Genuine question: How much of that financial improvement is due to them requiring companies to now pay for Docker Desktop on macOS? We found ourselves essentially with no option but to pay up for a full year on short notice. We want nothing of their other paid offerings like builds or repo hosting. The sales rep basically confirmed we're just paying for the thing we used to get for free now. The whole call was a giant "FU, too bad". Left an extremely bad taste in our mouths. Obviously we're going to focus heavily on dumping Docker Desktop as fast as possible in the next quarters.
> Obviously we're going to focus heavily on dumping Docker Desktop as fast as possible in the next quarters.
If you need to invest significant effort into dumping it, it's almost certainly cheaper to just pay for it. Especially so if the alternative makes any sort of compromise on developer experience.
My workplace is also working on dumping docker desktop. Their website says it's $24 per month per user if you have over 100 users. We have around 2000 engineers, so it's half a million dollars a year for something that used to be free.
If it takes two engineers half a year to get a replacement working you're already back in black, and honestly I'm not even sure why (in our specific case) it would take that long when there already are free alternatives.
In our case we have multiple tools that wrap docker and at first try none of them worked with podman. Podman doesn't actually have an API socket you can interact with. There is something called podman-helper but for the life of me I could not get it to work reliably. Also the API responses were not formatted the same way so now our code has to detect and fork logic if it is podman
And this is only the first example I saw. Now we have to root out all apps everywhere across the company that might integrate this tightly with docker.
Then there are performance considerations. Docker Inc apparently did quite a bit to improve performance, especially disk perf. We need to verify all of our existing workflows still work reliably.
None of this is hard, it just takes time and effort.
Yes, there is not a clear, free alternative. The license kicks in at 10MM in revenue, at that point there are certain things that are easier to pay than try to replace (Slack, Google Apps… ). Everyone has to make their own decision of where they focus their attention/money, in my case I have authorized for every one of my reports that has needed it and just moved on …
I’m mixed on this because I generally like paying for tools but this was too fast (institutional budget year pain) and Docker Mac was characterized by long-running unfixed bugs like high CPU usage. I think they really screwed up their business model and are burning through goodwill trying to recover but I wish they’d tried working with the community.
I mostly use the CLI so I have Podman a try and it took less than a single lunch to completely replace Docker for me. Performance is excellent for ARM, and acceptable for the x86 containers I infrequently use.
The problem is really more one of "we operated so long without paying and now, blam, everyone pays next year".
It'd be sort of like if github deciding "You know what, everyone now needs to pay $7 a month/user for github". Perfectly within their right, but also a little bit of whiplash for a large number of people.
The next question is if this will last. There's already competitors to docker (rancher/podman/various k8s on my box things).
It feels like a bait and switch. They got us hooked on a free product and then slapped us with a bill and only short time to change all of our software to not use it if we didn't want to. Also the pricing jumped up the longer you waited to sign. So we had little time to evaluate Rancher and others.
I do agree it is a product that is potentially worth paying for. I do NOT think that the product is worth the amount we were suddenly forced to pay. It felt like extortion.
Last time I checked, it was completely possible to install Virtualbox and normal Docker CLI on a Mac, and everything worked well (for me), without Docker Desktop at all.
But that last time was on Intel Macs; maybe the situation is completely different on ARM.
It doesn't work on M1 last I checked. And anyway even if they updated Virtualbox for ARM, Oracle is predatory and sends nasty emails about paying up if they detect anyone in your company uses it.
I remember that the open-source Virtualbox part is free from any nagware. The closed-source parts are those needed for desktop integration (good screen, clipboard, file sharing, etc), but they are not needed for running a Linux VM with Docker (or some other container runtime BTW).
