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.
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.
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.
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.