Podman rocks for me!
I find docker hard to use and full of pitfalls and podman isn't any worse. On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!
Was this a deal breaker for any company?
I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free.
If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license. So $90 / year for everyone, but if you have US developers your all-in payroll is probably going to be over $200,000 per developer or roughly $2 million dollars. In that context $90 is practically nothing. A single lunch for the dev team could cost almost double that.
To me that is a bargain, you're getting an officially supported tool that "just works" on all operating systems.
You end up having to track who has it installed. Hired 5 more people this week? How many of them will want docker desktop? Oh, we’ve maxed the licenses we bought? Time to re-open the procurement process and amend the purchase order.
An IT department for a company of that size should have ironed out workflows and automated ways to keep tabs on who has what and who needs what. They may also be under various compliance requirements that expect due diligence to happen every quarter to make sure everything is legit from a licensing perspective.
Even if it's not automated, it's normal for a team to email IT / HR with new hire requirements. Having a list of tools that need licenses in that email is something I've seen at plenty of places.
I would say there's lots of other tools where onboarding is more complicated from a license perspective because it might depend on if a developer wants to use that tool and then keeping tabs on if they are still using it. At least with Docker Desktop it's safe to say if you're on macOS you're using it.
I guess I'm not on board with this being a major conflict point.
I don't quite get this argument. How is that different from any piece of software that an employee will want in any sort of enterprise setting? From an IT operations perspective it is true that Docker Desktop on Windows is a little more annoying than something like an Adobe product, because Docker Desktop users need their local user to be part of their local docker security group on their specific machine. Aside from that I would argue that Docker Desktop is by far one of the easiest developer tools (and do note that I said developer tools) to track licenses for.
In non-enterprise setups I can see why it would be annoying but I suspect that's why it's free for companies with fewer than 250 people and 10 million in revenue.
Open source is different in exactly that, no procurement.
Finance makes procurement annoying so people are not motivated to go through it.
The usual way that procurement is handled, for the sake of everybody's sanity, is to sign a flat-rate / tiered contract, often with some kind of true-up window. That way the team that's trying to buy software licenses doesn't have their invoices swinging up/down every time headcount or usage patterns shifts, and they don't have to go back to the well every time they need more seats.
This is a reasonably well-oiled machine, but it does take fuel: setting up a new enterprise agreement like that takes humans and time, both of which are not free. So companies are incentivized to be selective in when they do it. If there's an option that requires negotiating a license deal, and an option that does not, there's decent inertia towards the latter.
All of which is a long way to say: many large enterprises are "good" at knowing how many of their endpoints are running what software, either by making getting software a paperwork process or by tracking with some kind of endpoint management (though it's noteworthy that there are also large enterprises that suck at endpoint management and have no clue what's running in their fleet). The "hard" part (where "hard" means "requires the business to expend energy they'd rather not) is getting a deal that doesn't involve the license seat counter / invoice details having to flex for each individual.
To draw a parallel: imagine a large open source project with a large userbase. The users interact with the project and a bunch of them have ideas for how to make it better! So they each cut feature requests against the project. The maintainers look at them. Some of the feature requests they'll work on, some of them they'll take well-formed pull requests. But some they'll say "look, we get that this is helpful for you, but we don't think this aligns with the direction we want the project to go".
A good procurement team realizes that every time the business inks a purchase agreement with a vendor, the company's portfolio has become incrementally more costly. For massive deals, most of that cost is paid in dollars. For cheaper software, the sticker price is low but there's still the cost of having one more plate to juggle for renewals / negotiations / tracking / etc.
So they're incentivized to be polite but firm and push back on whether there's a way to get the outcome in another way.
(this isn't to suggest that all or even most procurement teams are good, but there is a kernel of sanity in the concept even though it's often painful for the person who wants to buy something)
Also, I don't want to have to troubleshoot why the docker daemon isn't running every time I need it
Correct, but every additional software package and each additional license adds more to track.
Every new software license requires legal to review it.
These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)
Then they start investigating how often people use software packages and realize most people aren't actually using most software they have seats for. This happens because when software feels 'free' people request it for one-time use for a thing or to try it out and then forget about it, so you have low utilization across the board.
So they start making it harder to add new software. They start auditing usage. They may want reports on why software is still needed and who uses it.
It all adds up. I understand you don't think it should be this way, but it is at big companies. You're right that that the $24/user per month isn't much, but it's one of dozens of fees that get added, multiplied by every employee in the company, and now they need someone to maintain licenses, get them reviewed, interact with the rep every year, do the negotiation battles, and so on. It adds up fast.
Costs and management grow in an O(n*m) manner where n is employees and m is numbers of licenses per employee. It seems like nothing when you're small and people only need a couple licenses, but a few years in the aggregate bills are eye-popping and you realize the majority of people don't use most of the licenses they've requested (it really happens).
Contrast this with what it takes for an engineer to use a common, free tool: They can just use it. No approval process. No extra management steps for anyone. Nothing to argue that you need to use it every year at license audit time. Just run with it.
The business world is full of things that "should" be a certain way, but aren't.
For the technology world, double the number.
We'd all like to live in some magical imaginary HN "should" world, but none of us do. We all work in companies that are flawed, and sometimes those flaws get in the way of our work.
If you've never run into this, buy a lottery ticket.
Or when your IT department is prohibited from purchasing anything that doesn't come from Microsoft or CDW.
But I have to feed my family.
I'm in IT consulting. If most companies could even get the basic best practices of the field implemented, I wouldn't have a job.
This is going to differ company to company but since we're narrowing it to large companies I disagree. Usually there's a TPM that tracks license distribution and usage. Most companies provide that kind of information as part of their licensing program (and Docker certainly does.)
> Every new software license requires legal to review it.
Yes, but this is like 90% of what legal does - contract review. It's also what managers do but more on the negotiation end. Most average software engineers probably don't realize it but a lot of cloud services, even within a managed cloud provider like AWS, require contract and pricing negotiation.
> These centralized departments add up all of the license and SaaS costs and it shows up as one big number, which executives start pushing to decrease. When you let everyone get a license for everything they might need, it gets out of control quickly (many startups relearn this lesson in their growth phase)
As I said earlier, I can't speak for other companies but at large companies I've worked at this just simply isn't true. There's metrics for when the software isn't being used because the corporation is financially incentivized to shrink those numbers or consolidate on software that achieves similar goals. They're certainly individually tracked fairly far up the chain even if they do appear as a big number somewhere.
I don't think there's any stiffing going on, since the open source contributors knowingly contributed with a license that specifically says that payment isn't required. It is not reasonable for them to take the benefits of doing that but then expect payment anyway.
I'm not sure you realize that "open source" means anyone anywhere is free to use, modify, and redistribute the software in any way they see fit? Maybe you're thinking of freeware or shareware which often _do_ come with exceptions for commercial use?
But anyway, as an open source contributor, I have never felt I was being "stiffed" just because a company uses some software that I helped write or improve. I contribute back to projects because I find them useful and want to fix the problems that I run into so I don't have to maintain my own local patches, help others avoid the same problems, and because making the software better is how I give back to the open source community.
1. As parallel commenters have pointed out, no. Plenty of open source developers exist who aren't interested in getting paid for their open source projects. You can tell this because some open source projects sell support or have donation links or outright sell their open source software and some do not. This line of thinking seems to come out of some utopian theoretical world where open source developers shouldn't sell their software because that makes them sell-outs but users are expected to pay them anyways.
2. I do love the idea of large companies paying for open source software they use because it tends to set up all kinds of good incentives for the long term health of software projects. That said, paying open source projects tends to be comically difficult. Large companies are optimized for negotiating enterprise software agreements with a counterparty that is primed to engage in that process. They often don't have a smooth way to like, just feed money into a Donate form, or make a really big Github or Patreon Sponsorship, etc. So even people in large companies that really want to give money to open source devs struggle to do so.
Or so I was told when I made the monumental mistake of trying to fight such a policy once.
So now we just have a don't ask don't tell kind of gig going on.
I don't really know what the solution is, but dev laptops are goldmines for haxxors, and locking them down stops them from really being dev machines. shrug
Or so it seems to me whenever I have to deal with them. We ended up with Microsoft defender on our corp Macs even.. :|
There is no bottom to the barrel, and incompetence and insensitivity can rise quite high in some cases.
OT because not docker
In the realm of artistic software (thinking Alberton Live and Adobe suites) licensing hell is a real thing. In my recent experience it sorts the amateurs from the pros, in favour of amateurs
The time spent learning the closed system includes hours and dollars wrestling licenses. Pain++. Not just the unaffordable price, but time that could be spent creating
But for an aspiring professional it is the cost of entry. These tools must be mastered (if not paid for, ripping is common) as they have become a key part of the mandated tool chains, to the point of enshittification
The amateur is able to just get on with it, and produce what they want when they want with a dizzying array of possible tools
Also, latest with 20 employees or computers, someone in charge of IT (sysadmin, IT department) would decide to use a software asset management tool (aka software inventory system) to automatically track, roll out, uninstall, monitor vetted software. Anything else is just unprofessional.
it's pretty stupid because the same curl | bash that could have done that could have just posted the same contents directly to the internet without the container. The best chance you actually have is to do as much development as possible inside a sealed environment like ... a container where at least you have some way to limit visibility of partially trusted code of your file system.
As far as IT operations goes, it's usually easier to get approval for paid products since they come with support and are viewed as more "trustworthy". At least in my experience.
I've never worked in a 300+ organisation where you could "just use" things. I have worked in places where they gave some of us local admins (I've been a domainadmin in a few places too), but there is usually a large bureaucracy around software regardless of licenses. Where I work right now, licensing is a minor part of it for companies with good payment systems (like Docker) where it'll automatically go on the books and be EU tax deducted. Compare that to GitKraken where you need to create an IT owner account inside their system, and then distribute the annual licenses manually after you pay for them with a credit card that you will then need to manually submit for tax deduction.
Not that this should be an argument for docker. The idea that having someone to call makes a piece of software "safer" is as ridiculous at it sounds. Especially if you've ever tried "calling" a company you buy 20 licenses from, and when I say call what I really mean is talking with a chatbot and then waiting a month for them to get back to you via email. But IT's gonna IT.