> 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 …
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.