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We Need to Talk About Docker Hub

(www.linuxserver.io)
128 points darthShadow | 1 comments | 24 Jan 25 11:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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concerndc1tizen ◴[24 Jan 25 12:20 UTC] No.42812414[source]▶
If you don't like it, then why don't you use a different provider?

If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?

Storage, compute, and traffic, isn't free. You've been the beneficiary of charity for years.

Yes, the open source community has relied on this implicit charity as a parasite, by exploiting whatever free services they could. And now we're paying the price, as you say, by having DockerHub as the default provider.

My suggestion is therefore that we need independent solutions, that are fully funded as a charity, and stop relying on freemium services from corporations that fundamentally don't care about the public good.

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sealeck ◴[24 Jan 25 12:23 UTC] No.42812438[source]▶
This is really a question of framing. The other way you can look at it is: Docker has benefitted from a community adopting its products, and developing software that makes Docker more useful. As someone who sells Docker services, you benefit from a greater market size.

It's like how WordPress have benefitted from people authoring plugins – even though wordpress.org has hosted them for "free", this has been good commercial sense as it allows them to sell more WordPress.com to people.

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1. keybored ◴[24 Jan 25 16:55 UTC] No.42815002[source]▶
With your framing this looks like the free/“free” initial use of such a framing is similar to free accounts on new social media platforms. In that case the motivation is super clear: grow the social platform since a social platform with few users is useless. Then when they get big enough they start charging. Once you’re already locked in via all sorts of connections.

Again in the case of social platforms: for the longest time this was framed as user entitlement if anyone didn’t like it. Which failed to see the other side. Yes, the users wanted something free but the company also got something back from the user.

We could go back and forth on details like the service growing to such a point that the free service becomes too much of a burden on them. But consider the case when the free service was treated by the business as an investment for $X which was supposed to carry that cost until the proverbial rug could be pulled from the users without a mass exodus—grow your user base until you have enough of a mass to demand a considerable escape velocity in order to be avoided.

Again, arguments could be made either way. But it is definitely not as simple-cut as an altruistic service versus selfish users/consumers.

I’m sure someone versed in Economics could summarize the above in a phrase or a sentence.