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.
atlassian and google and okta and ghe and this and that (claude code?). that eventually starts to stack up.
You have a valid point in that many HN commentators seem to live in a bubble where spending thousands of dollars on a developer for "convenience" is seen as a no-brainer. They often work in companies that don't make a profit, but are funded by huge VC investments. I don't blame them, as it is a valid choice given the circumstances. If you have the money, why not? But they may start thinking differently if the flow of VC money slows down.
It's similar to how some wealthy people buy a private jet. Their time is valuable, and the cost seems justified (at least if you don’t care about the environmental impact).
I believe that frugality is actually the default mode of business, but many companies in SV are protected from the consequences by the VCs.