I'm not sure I'd call this "coming clean" since it doesn't seem like they really changed anything. They just apologized for that what they are doing is upsetting people.
The 2% they’re referring to are businesses that are using Docker’s hosted services for free. The majority of the outrage was from people thinking about the non-business users, that is, open source projects, which Docker unintentionally implied would be impacted by this change. Docker are apologising for their poor communication which made people think this change applied to more than just a tiny portion of the user base (who are probably happy to pay). They’re not apologising for the change.
> Less than 2% of Docker users have a Free Team organization on their account.
I don't think so. The quote above is what they say on that page, and I think that is a pretty useless metric. It affects 2% of all Docker Hub users, 100% of all Free Team users.
Anybody who uses "docker pull" or "FROM" and not pointing at their own hosting or their own paid Docker account was affected as evidenced by the thousands of comments worried about the impact.
> We’d also like to clarify that public images will only be removed from Docker Hub if their maintainer decides to delete them.
> Will open source images I rely on get deleted?
> Not by Docker. Public images will only disappear if the maintainer of the image decides to proactively delete it from Docker Hub. If the maintainer takes no action, we will continue to distribute their public images.
People may have thought they were affected, which is what they seem to be apoligising for.
They also are saying the maintainers will be unable to update the images after the 30 days. So the panic and bitching are perfectly deserved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35188691
For TEAM accounts that aren't "Docker sponsored open source" teams.
They should allow a TEAM->PERSONAL conversion for any open source account that doesn't qualify to be "Docker sponsored." But really this is a communications fail more than anything.
This only ever applied to the *Team* accounts. I have a paid non-team/personal account, but I am also aware that I could have a free personal account if I didn't need private repositories.
In other words, they weren't clear enough in their communication, which is what they're apologizing for.
But the internet outrage mob is going to yell about the evil of The Man no matter what I say, so I don't know why I bother...
One of the difficulties of public relations is communicating to multiple audiences at once. One of Docker’s audiences are the paying customers who outside that 2% and would want some assurance that if docker makes errors, those errors are smaller in magnitude. This statement seems like it is aimed at assuaging the worries of that audience. Is it good practice? I do not know.
What if you are a "closed source developer" at work but an open-source one during your free time? What if you are a billionaire codes? What if… etc. You could make TL;DR's targeted at specific audiences, but you still need the same introduction for everyone.
Is that a serious suggestion? Who on earth would take the time to look through all of those to see which one best fits them? Companies have enough trouble getting press releases read already.
I guess then you could use some heuristics and ChatGPT to tailor the press release to the particular viewer.
For example if the user has a screen resolution of three 4K monitors side by side, using Linux, and coming from a Silicon Valley IP address, they are probably a developer. If they have the screen resolution of an iPad Pro and a New York IP address they are probably an executive on the go. The HTML5 accelerometer API might also say something about whether they're reading your press release in bed, while sitting, or standing. Use ChatGPT to reword the press release appropriately.
This is a genuinely terrifying vision of the future. Already things like prices may differ based one’s location. Adding content writing AI to the mix is positively dystopian.
I think that was an attempt to describe that the change won't delete tons of projects like many believed, and break downstream users, not that it was too small of a group to care about.
Agreed. It's frustrating to see companies try to downplay the impact of their mistakes by using statistics like "less than 2% of our users." Companies NEED to take responsibility for their actions and show genuine empathy for those affected, rather than trying to minimize the impact of their mistakes with vague statistics.
> 'We're sorry we mistreated you, look how small you are to us.'
They could choose not to share any data, which is what most companies default to.
You're complaining about something so small as if they aren't handling this entire thing beautifully at this point. They noticed their mistake, and corrected it swiftly to keep the community from bifurcating. What else do you want, exactly?
No there isn't. This is entirely subjective and you're acting like they said "Fuck our customers" when they just shared data. Anything you want to imply beyond that says more about you than it does about any part of Docker.
> The first implies that they have up to 2% of users which they don't respect, and undermines their apology.
Where does this implication come from? Why is Docker not given the benefit of the doubt when they are already extending an olive branch...? This isn't Microsoft.
I guess if you want to change things, you should shoot for a position in PR at docker. Otherwise, you look like a rube for acting as though they "could have done better with one sentence." I bet you're fun at parties.
They said they intend to delete customer data if they don't switch to paid plans: this means "fuck our customers", collectively and indiscriminately, not only the selected foreclosed accounts but everybody that depends on them.
> They said they intend to delete customer data if they don't switch to paid plans
Customers who are running businesses and knowingly breaking the ToS? I'm not sure why businesses like Docker aren't allowed to defend their revenue.
It's actually pretty hilarious how many of you are coming out of the woodwork to attack Docker, they are not the enemy in any way, shape or form and if they disappear you're gonna miss them.
Personally, I expect what I paid for from a free service, and I consider depending on gifts and uncertain platforms a reckless risk.
But, as a business whose prosperity depends on the goodwill of masses of users, Docker can and should "defend their revenue" in a way that minimizes collateral damage in the form of
1) gratuitous bullshit, untrustworthiness, lack of transparency, and perceived evil intentions (e.g. their second announcement)
2) technical uncertainty and security risks (for orphaned images of uncertain status)
3) inconvenience, without additional revenue, to the vast majority of users that aren't included in this the shakedown
There are rational businesses and there are businesses that drive them away their customers; in the long term, the former tend to "defend their revenue" much better.
It feels like people just enjoy digging into outrage - this sort of nit picking at specific phrasing in communications is baseless, and happens for literally any incident where an apology is issued.
Its wild how the same people will complain that some corporate missive is completely content-free while at the same time punishing any attempt at earnest communication by scouring the missive for a raised edge to take offense at.
The 'problematic' phrase is right before the section detailing who is not impacted - which is what many people are going to want to know! "Wait, should I be worried about this?'
This is an example of my point actually - these types of posts are magnets for people that cannot be pleased.
Ever wonder why Google outage notifications always say stuff like "this impacted 0.01752% of users"? Because if they leave that out, the PR department ends up flooded with questions from reporters about "how bad was this outage, exactly?", and less-diligent publications running "Google suffers massive outage" headlines.
It's really misleading though, as it only reflect the owners of the images. Presumably I should count as an affected user if I don't own the image, but try to download it.
> If you don't upgrade to a paid subscription, Docker will retain your organization data for 30 days, after which it will be subject to deletion. During that period you will maintain access to any of your public images.
That sounds a lot like the public images were subject to deletion. At the very least, subject to being frozen in time and not updated/updateable, which can be worse in some cases.
The "2% of our users" is indeed misleading since most users don't run organizations, and it's mainly orgs that were affected. A better metric would be what % of orgs were impacted.
(Note: I'm neutral on the main issue of whether Docker's moves are evil, etc. I don't really care)
To me this "This impacted less than x%" business is more of a classic Apple damage control PR statement, designed to convey to the whole userbase, "You almost definitely aren't affected, it's just a tiny number of whiners making all this fuss, and look how small they are!"
It's worse than just handwaving, it's straight up nonsensical. Perhaps it is literally true that only 2% of distinct accounts that log into Docker Hub have this plan, but for the vast majority of people "using Docker Hub" means "pulling public images from Docker Hub", not "logging into Docker Hub", so by a more reasonable criteria (say % of images pulled) I'm sure its at least an order of magnitude greater.
Yea. I don't think its necessary to even add that part since it seems the only reason they are responding is due to the negative backlash from the open source community. The fact that they added the % appears to me as an attempt to marginalize and compartmentalize the perception of this decision so it doesn't spread into the perception of their paying customers. Good luck with that.
Also, the 2% of the impacted users might have 50% of _all_ users as a dependency (just throwing out a random number for illustration), so I'm not sure that the "2% users" messaging matters to the recipients of that PR.
Their open source program [1] only grants a free 1-year Docker Team subscription. After which time the whole system is unusable. And most of those features aren't what open source teams even need which is surely just basic multi-user access.
They really should have just tightened the entry criteria for their open source offering if they were so concerned about it being misused.
(Docker DevRel team here) For clarification, the program grants one year of access, but is indefinitely renewable as long as the program is still compliant with current criteria.
Thank you for the clarification. For reference, are there any open source projects you've seen that suddenly change course to being paid products and would lose open source status according to Docker? Any Linux distros that suddenly went closed source? Are there any sort of general public licenses that might preclude projects from even doing so?
Say a distro sells laptops with the distro pre-installed while also providing the same image online and might also sell consulting services to companies utilizing the distro.
According to my undestanding of the terms of Docker's opend source program, even if said distro was fully open-source and a run by a non-profit they would be non-eligible to participate in the program.
Is this renewal automatic? Having to go recertify with docker once a year for my tiny open source project that we happen to have an image for is literally infinity percent more hassle than I would like to deal with.
Too little, too late, everyone i know is looking for ways of leaving docker for good. This last announcement just cemented the lack of confidence in the platform. As someone put it to me recently:» a bunch of execs trying to squeeze out a dying platform for a bonus before moving to another money sqeezing project.» At work we made the plan to leave today.
If they are listening to feedback, first is that a 30 day timeframe sends the message that "we feel our profit is more important than whatever else you are working on, so much that you should either pay us, or if you cannot afford it, immediately halt your other activities to reduce our costs." None of that builds trust.
As someone affected, I'm ok with paying.
* I don't like feeling tricked
* I don't like feeling held hostage
* Make your changes in a manner that preceding the announcement with "SURPRISE!" wouldn't be fitting
This was done with no notice--basically a bill for RIGHT NOW with no warning, and it seems that the only reason for that was greed? Docker just hit 100 million in ARR. I mean, really, you can't afford to role this out gracefully?!?
Docker Hub has become deeply integrated into the workflow of development/pipelines/runtime environments/etc. Announcing something like this with 30 days notice is extremely insulting. They're a software company (maybe not...?) and should be well aware of the amount of interruption that a 30 day notice on something like this causes.
I don’t think I said anything about possible or impossible. But their revenue is only one part of the equation. If you don’t know the other numbers, it’s not particularly useful to say here’s a big number they must be profitable.
When they did the "it's not free anymore" rugpull on Docker Desktop, I couldn't use it at work anymore since they wouldn't invoice us for less than a 50 seat license. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses won't buy things without invoicing for legal reasons.
It really upset me because I had a pretty solid workflow with docker desktop on a mac. Now I can't use that anymore. I am not surprised they continue to make foolish moves trying to monetize their software.
I get it, you need to monetize your software... but this is dumb.
Pretty hard to get NET30 invoicing on a transaction which is less than $450, especially if you've chosen the monthly plan. It's just not worth the labor chasing an unpaid $450 invoice every damn month.
I assume they mean Docker issues an invoice which the company's AP department can then pay by either cutting a check or ACH transfer. At least that's what we had to get all our vendors to start doing when the company I worked for killed off corporate cards and quit letting employees expense things like this.
Hey! They decided to do invoicing, after all! When they couldn't find a way to take purchase orders in the initial license obligation round and we were going to have to go through a third party licensing service to pay, we did a little math, and realized that it was cheaper to let one of the guys on the DevOps team create and maintain the customized WSL install option, with the bonus of steering the developers to our internal registry out of the box, because we really don't want devs pulling stuff directly from Docker Hub without any sort of traceability, much less (shudder) pushing anything there. The prospect of having to manage hundreds (or more) of user accounts with SSO "on the roadmap, pinky swear" pushed the math over the top.
Many months later, this is still proving to have been a good call.
Moral of the story: do not try to shove a category change on large corporations without having basic things large corporations routinely require in order to give you money, especially if replacing you requires a lot less spend on extra internal labor and material than you're demanding to be paid.
Yea the WSL option is what most places I know are doing. Unfortunately, I like using MacOS so it won't work for me haha. I don't trust the team writing the generic free version for Macs.
On the other side of the spectrum, working somewhere that would have purchased thousands of licenses, they were equally unaware of what larger corporations want or need for such arrangements.
They were so blinded by giant dollar/Euro signs when insisting that we take loads of those ~20/month licenses that included a lot of things that are anti-features to most enterprises (we need to prevent people from pulling/pushing to Docker Hub!) but left out things that would make it less miserable (SSO/SAML), that they couldn't see that absolutely no one was going to put five figures on their corporate card each month.
I see that they now have those things, but it would have been very clever to have asked a few potential customers about these things ahead of time, and made sure they had them as soon as they stuck their hands out... or had a few ex-corporate types around to run this all by before telling us that we will be buying Docker licenses within 120 days for everyone who happens to have Docker Desktop installed. At least they were savvy enough to realize that large companies couldn't have begun to cope with much less notice, but as it was, the rough start with a looming deadline was enough motivation to get us trying alternatives right away.
Ah, the good ole "my company won't pay for a $5/month tool that I like because the tool maker won't invoice my company for less than 50 users, so instead of paying $5/month myself on my credit card, I literally 'can't use it anymore' out of principle."
Big companies have people around whose sole job is to make sure that all software that needs to be licensed, is licensed, and that these licenses are the exact ones that meet the providers' rules. This usually means that you are not allowed to use a personally-owned license on a company computer.
Why?
Because the consequences of getting this wrong can be far more expensive than whatever productivity gains you, the individual employee, claim to be achieving.
Docker, for example: we had absolutely no interest in individual users directly accessing their online features (we took a bit of trouble to block them, in fact), so theoretically, the free Personal licenses should have been fine. No.
Ok, so just have each Docker user pay that $5 themselves. How do we make sure every person who has Docker installed on their PC really is paying for a license? Even if we gave them all corporate cards, and Docker was going to be cool with several hundred accounts (or more) from the same domain not being on the "Business" plan, we then get to set up a process with Accounting to make sure the PC scans match the payments.
This might all sound ridiculous to start-up/boutique employees, but is a basic fact of life in corporate IT... which Docker was hoping to get a lot of money out of.
What are the 'consequences of getting this wrong'? Surely if a company has 'y' users all wanting to use a software product that company purchases y+1 licenses just to make sure they are covered.
The problem is a company wanting 'y' licenses more often than not want a y where the y is 1 and they're not looking to engage the thought of making a y+1 purchase.
However, they still want to be invoiced for the purchase and have their payment come 30 days later, which will require many additional hours chasing that late payment that comes 45 days later.
Yet somehow, they don't understand every scammer uses the exact same approach, but of course the scammer never bothers with the pretense of offering to actually pay any late bills, so in fact scammers cost the software provide less in the way of lost time.
If your company can credibly show that we knew that there were instances of your product running on several hundred of our PCs, but we can't prove that we were paying for the licenses, you can sue us for a lot more than those licenses would have cost, depending on where you're located and where we have official presence. You might not win, but you're still going to cost us a lot of money and time. Relying on tens of thousands of users to potentially manage their own licenses for thousands of products would be an absolute nightmare.
But why do we know what users have installed on the PCs assigned to them, aside from the licensing? When your product has a security hole (and unless your product never, ever talks to the Internet or other devices, it will someday), we need to know exactly who has it so that we can force them to patch. Again, tens of thousands of users with potentially thousands of products that need to have security issues tracked. Nightmare.
So if your custom software house** doesn't want to sell us your product in a way and provide management mechanisms that we feel comfortable with, then we'll find one of the many that does, or is happy to work with our preferred resellers. Or we will help departments redesign their processes to not need it.
Corporate IT cares deeply about what managers want, as they pay the bills. If they want your product for their subordinates, we will work to make that happen in a way that keeps our legal department and IT security management happy. Corporate IT cares deeply about users being able to use the products and services their managers are paying for. Corporate IT does not give a fig what individual users want, if they can't get their managers to pay for the cost of us dealing with that new product.
Negotiating license agreements and tracking usage, as I said before, is a full time job for several people. I am fortunately not one of them, but I've worked with them when supporting products within the company. Large companies do not employ these folks out of charity.
Corporate IT and corporate life is certainly not for everyone. Corporate IT doesn't work this way because we're humorless prigs; it works this way because there are billions in sensitive data and intricate production processes to protect, and tens of thousands of well-meaning folks who are competent in things other than infosec potentially providing network access to people who are not well-meaning.
If you want that sweet sweet corporate cash, figure out how to accommodate their purchase and IT management processes. Software resellers may be a good compromise. If you don't want to deal with corporate purchasing, don't be upset when a lot of your potential users end up with someone else's product.
** Anything smaller and more niche than SAP may as well be a "custom software house".
Too late to add this edit: now that I've thought about it for a bit, I think that many of our software purchases are via software resellers. One of the main reasons is that getting a new vendor approved by Accounting for payments is a slow, painful (to us) process that involves Legal (contracts!). As I'm neither an accountant nor a lawyer, I'm willing to accept that they have good reasons for their processes (preventing me from easily funneling money to a relative, for example) and just see it as another fact of corporate life instead of railing against it. In return, they do us the courtesy of accepting that they can't just install whatever they like on their PCs.
Legal is often still involved when it comes to new software products, because, among other things, there's GDPR. Oh, and Works Council.
My main point remains unchanged: relying on tens of thousands of end users to manage their licenses is something that large enterprises just can't do, so we end up with rules that seem draconian, and you, the hopeful seller of software/services to be used in corporate environments, will benefit from understanding how we work, even if you think it's stupid.
I love big enterprise, where ten people can have daily meetings for a month to decide how to pay a few hundred dollars.
Yes, this happened to me. More than once.
No, you can’t just pull your wallet out and offer to pay for it yourself with cash. You’re not an “approved supplier” and it’s the supplier that needs to provide warranty support.
Also if you pay for it yourself, then you’re providing it as a “gift” and that could be construed as corruption — unless you’re reimbursed, but it’s above the threshold…
This whole thread has given me flashbacks to that time when the project manager broke down in tears and put his credit card back in his wallet…
That's literally how it works in big corps and how it should work in general - company property should be paid for by the company, and the companies liability in case anything goes wrong.
You should not be giving your $x (it does not matter that its only 5) to the company.
It's almost becoming a cliche for companies to release damage control follow-ups like this after they pull a bait and switch.
It's always "we're sorry that we didn't communicate our bait and switch effectively". Not we're sorry that we pulled a bait and switch. We're sorry you didn't understand the value in this bait and switch. It's your fault, actually. But we're sorry you're angry. Now stop giving us negative attention.
The forces of capitalism reward this, it will continue to happen as long as we pick pure capitalism as a system, and keep assigning values to companies purely on financials with no consideration toward their ability to empathize and communicate.
There's no such thing as "pure capitalism" – not if you're talking about things that exist.
In an ideal free market with perfectly-rational omniscient actors, this issue wouldn't occur. I don't think you even need the omniscience: trust, memory, reputation/vouching and basic game theory should be sufficient (though I haven't proven this). Alternatively: a free market with contracts, where all things go through the system, would work.
In the real world, the system consists of people, each of whom is optimising for a particular thing. Very few people are optimising for "make the most money, at the expense of all else". Show me anyone (even a billionaire), and I'll show you somebody who values other things higher than the accumulation of money. And plenty of things don't go through "the system of capitalism": we have commons, and volunteers, and favours, and coerced unpaid labour / wage theft.
"The forces of capitalism" might be a good shorthand for the reasons behind this problem, but it's not strictly an accurate one: these issues aren't inherent to capitalism. They're not problems with capitalism, but problems with this system. (Capitalism does have other, different problems that are pretty baked in, like how capital is power and power lets you accrue capital, but I don't see how that relates to this issue.)
This feels like a win for capitalism to me. The actually innovative Docker did is open source, and replacements already exist for DockerHub. So, we get the good tech they created, and the company with the user-hostile choices dies, or becomes irrelevant.
This is somewhat an extension of modern politics, which is largely seen by political professionals as a problem of "messaging", where policy details are secondary to how people can be persuaded to think about those policies.
This speaks to the product culture at Docker. They are unable to admit they are changing direction after negative customer feedback, so they are pretending this was always their plan, and shifting the blame to their customers.
It is similar to pseudo-blameless engineering cultures, where engineers won't admit to bugs, or update the status indicator, least they face the shame of writing a post mortem, or having it brought up in their performance review.
I have no idea about their internals but I’m curious how many people used docker’ own registry offering as their repo manager of choice because it’s configured to lookup the docker registry by default. Easier to setup pipelines and dev env workflows etc.
If this move means that people have to now manage access to multiple registries like quay and ghcr, will that also incentivize people to go ahead and try migrating to these other registries. Especially given that dockers own registry has such poor permission management.
The problem runs much deeper than that. Most of what Docker offers is commodity software. You can get docker image hosting from a variety of sources and hosting your own registry isn't that hard. All you need is a docker container and some file storage or bucket. Docker for desktop is nice but there are free alternatives.
Docker registries are included with most cloud services (AWS, Azure, Gcloud, digital ocean) and you can use those to self host as well without too much issues. Github and gitlab offer docker registries as well. As do lots of other companies. Mostly, those services make money from other things than hosting docker images. That's just a low value commodity that they need to offer the really interesting stuff. If you are going to charge people for some expensive kubernetes cluster, they need a place to dump their container images. So you offer that for free. It's just a few GB of storage. It literally is a rounding error on the total bill. It does not matter. Charging for that does not make sense.
That's the problem docker has right now: they need companies to pay them absurd amounts of money for something that is essentially a low value commodity and they don't really have anything with a lot of value that they could charge for instead. And the harder they insist people need to pay, the more they erode their position as a leader in this space (which arguably they lost years ago). While it was free and convenient, people used them. But now that that's no longer the case, people engineer around them. They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The one asset they still had (people treating them as the de-facto place to park docker containers) is basically being lost. And as soon as that stops, it's going to get harder for them to gain new customers or even retain existing ones.
Contrast that with Github that used to charge for stuff that they now give away for free. I paid for it back in the day. And now I don't. Except Github is making loads of money from companies that outgrow the freemium tier. And they have a steady supply of happy freemium users using their services for free transitioning to valuable paid services. And they get to host the entirety (well close to it) of the software developer population on this planet. It's the largest professional network outside of linkedin. Which of course MS also owns. It would be madness to incentivize users to not use that by charging for it. It's way too valuable for that.
Speaking of MS, they should just buy out Docker. Fire the management. Get rid of their sales department and revitalize docker and dockerhub development and integrate it into github. It's so complementary to Github that it's a no-brainer. And probably investors are getting fed up with the way things are going at docker. I imagine this could be a relatively cheap acquisition for them. This isn't OpenAI, LinkedIn, or Github.
If you don't meet the strict criteria of the Open Source Program, for example you are a for profit company publishing an open source image, you can't upload new versions of your public images. Your images are one CVE away from becoming useless.
If you do meet the criteria, they will build images for you. No way to have your own build process. All artifacts are made public.
* "public images will only be removed from Docker Hub if their maintainer decides to delete them"
* "Public images will only disappear if the maintainer of the image decides to proactively delete it from Docker Hub. If the maintainer takes no action, we will continue to distribute their public images."
This sounds good, but it would be better to explicitly say "if you opt to let your free organization be suspended, Docker Hub will continue distributing your public images indefinitely anyway". It feels like there's a loophole here where if a public image comes to have no maintainer - because they abandoned its organization - then it no longer benefits from this assurance. That seems unlikely, but given how this change has been going so far, it's tough to give Docker the benefit of the doubt.
Would be worried that the old images will still be distributed, but if an open source maintainer needed to push an update (e.g. for security reasons) they'd need to sign up to the paid account
> You can migrate to a Free Team organization to a Personal account by opening a support ticket. No action will be taken against your account while your ticket is being processed.
Support request sent, I wish there were more clear on what "Topic" and "Severity" this kind of request falls into.
#HugOps to the tech support team that's going to be flooded with requests.
> You can migrate from a Free Team organization to a Personal account by opening a support ticket. No action will be taken against your account while your ticket is being processed.
This company raised $400M+ and they cannot be arsed to implement a feature to change account types.
Compared to the recent apology from Fly.io [1], Docker's corporate apology is terrible. Fly's was open about the struggles they faced and how they feel about it, empathetic to their customers, and come across as genuine (also reinforced by mrkurt's active follow up both in their community, as wel as here on HN).
Docker's on the other hand is none of that, and full of corporate PR red flags:
- "This only impacted less than 2% of our users" signals that they're not really sorry. It tells me they see this as a 'loud minority' problem
- "This does not affect [list of 6 other types of subscriptions]" -> signals the post is partially being used to promote the other subscriptions. Reinforced by the "what are the benefits of a Docker subscription" at the bottom.
- It's still unclear (to me) what is the actual implication for some of the non-official open source projects here. On the one hand they say: "Public images will only disappear if the maintainer decides to proactively delete it from Docker Hub". Further down they mention "we will defer any organization suspension or deletion while the DSOS application is under review". Clearly they do intent to suspend organisations, but maybe let old images remain? Then the problem remains, as it prevents future updates.
Despite what it tries to say in words, (for me) this post just reinforces the initial signal of both not understanding and not caring about the open source usage.
> It tells me they see this as a 'loud minority' problem
I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s minimizing. Don’t worry, it’s only 2%.
The problem is that’s 2% directly. If my organization has a Docker license, we’re not effected because we’re commercial.
But that’s not true is it? If we use Docker there is a very good chance that we use or base some of our images on open source images. We’re effected indirectly.
I admit it’s probably not possible to measure, maybe even estimate.
But the total number of organizations this change will be a problem for us way more than 2%. And they don’t want to admit it.
I would guess that those 2% of users account for more than 2% of the load on Docker Hub. Open source projects on a regular release cadence would push images more frequently than your average user, and those public images from the projects themselves were probably used in FROM statements more frequently than other images.
I think they used one metric (resources used) when deciding to kill free teams, then their PR team scrambled to find another metric to make the whole kerfuffle seem like a tempest in a teapot when the backlash hit.
I have nothing against Docker Inc. But it's worth noting that this kind of screw up happens when your company, from the top down, does not practice a culture in which empathy/compassion for people comes first.
In all areas of the business, everyone should first be thinking, how does this impact the people using this thing? Have I talked to them? Do they understand what's happening? Do they have concerns? Have I fully addressed them? Is this going to make their lives harder, or will this be scary, or confusing?
It's my biggest pet peeve. Both as a user and an employee. If you don't take the time to care, it's really obvious, and an easy way to piss people off and inconvenience them. From a business perspective that drives customers to your competitors and makes employees quit. From a personal perspective, it's just a dick thing to do.
Can't they just idk release a list of the images that are likely to be impacted unless the owner takes action?
I don't care much of the business decision, it's their house.
I care for the persons I support whom use docker and I dont see a way to prepare them without sounding like a crackpot and looking like a fool if they after making noise turns out they aren't impacted.
1. Let any user have how many "free teams" they want, but restrict the image size (under 1GB?) and/or downloads (under 1,000/month?). Maybe let the community vote for open source images exempt from this restriction.
2. Run a free link redirect service: user registers my-team on hub.docker.com, links my-team/my-image with their preferred registry my-registry.com, client-side docker pull my-team/my-image resolves automagically to my-registry.com/my-team/my-image.
3. Let paying teams sponsor free teams. Maybe allow multiple organizations to sponsor a single team. (The free team should be able to refuse sponsorship on a case by case basis)
(from the Docker DevRel team) Ha! Just had to say... this gave me a good laugh! We're trying to get better... I swear! Comms are hard. We'll get there.
Appreciate it. I'd advise to try hard to not be dismissive of even the more snide and flamey comments in this thread - their interpretations are valid from what I see posted so far.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] thread'We're sorry we mistreated you, look how small you are to us.'
I don't think so. The quote above is what they say on that page, and I think that is a pretty useless metric. It affects 2% of all Docker Hub users, 100% of all Free Team users.
> We’d also like to clarify that public images will only be removed from Docker Hub if their maintainer decides to delete them.
> Will open source images I rely on get deleted?
> Not by Docker. Public images will only disappear if the maintainer of the image decides to proactively delete it from Docker Hub. If the maintainer takes no action, we will continue to distribute their public images.
People may have thought they were affected, which is what they seem to be apoligising for.
They should allow a TEAM->PERSONAL conversion for any open source account that doesn't qualify to be "Docker sponsored." But really this is a communications fail more than anything.
This only ever applied to the *Team* accounts. I have a paid non-team/personal account, but I am also aware that I could have a free personal account if I didn't need private repositories.
In other words, they weren't clear enough in their communication, which is what they're apologizing for.
But the internet outrage mob is going to yell about the evil of The Man no matter what I say, so I don't know why I bother...
Why not just release multiple statements and links?
"Click here for customized PR statement if you are a open source developer"
"Click here for customized PR statement if you are a closed source developer"
"Click here for customized PR statement if you are an executive who can't code"
"Click here for customized PR statement if you are a billionaire who invested in Docker but secretly don't know what it is"
etc.
For example if the user has a screen resolution of three 4K monitors side by side, using Linux, and coming from a Silicon Valley IP address, they are probably a developer. If they have the screen resolution of an iPad Pro and a New York IP address they are probably an executive on the go. The HTML5 accelerometer API might also say something about whether they're reading your press release in bed, while sitting, or standing. Use ChatGPT to reword the press release appropriately.
They could choose not to share any data, which is what most companies default to.
You're complaining about something so small as if they aren't handling this entire thing beautifully at this point. They noticed their mistake, and corrected it swiftly to keep the community from bifurcating. What else do you want, exactly?
There's a world of difference between "This impacted less than 2% of our users." and "This impacted about 2% of our users."
The first implies that they have up to 2% of users which they don't respect, and undermines their apology.
I agree that it's good that they responded quickly, and I know there's a tradeoff between fast and perfect.
No there isn't. This is entirely subjective and you're acting like they said "Fuck our customers" when they just shared data. Anything you want to imply beyond that says more about you than it does about any part of Docker.
> The first implies that they have up to 2% of users which they don't respect, and undermines their apology.
Where does this implication come from? Why is Docker not given the benefit of the doubt when they are already extending an olive branch...? This isn't Microsoft.
I guess if you want to change things, you should shoot for a position in PR at docker. Otherwise, you look like a rube for acting as though they "could have done better with one sentence." I bet you're fun at parties.
Customers who are running businesses and knowingly breaking the ToS? I'm not sure why businesses like Docker aren't allowed to defend their revenue.
It's actually pretty hilarious how many of you are coming out of the woodwork to attack Docker, they are not the enemy in any way, shape or form and if they disappear you're gonna miss them.
But, as a business whose prosperity depends on the goodwill of masses of users, Docker can and should "defend their revenue" in a way that minimizes collateral damage in the form of
1) gratuitous bullshit, untrustworthiness, lack of transparency, and perceived evil intentions (e.g. their second announcement)
2) technical uncertainty and security risks (for orphaned images of uncertain status)
3) inconvenience, without additional revenue, to the vast majority of users that aren't included in this the shakedown
There are rational businesses and there are businesses that drive them away their customers; in the long term, the former tend to "defend their revenue" much better.
An Olive branch is, "We fucked up, sorry about that, this is what we are going to do, or not going to do moving forward to fix the issue.
Fuckery is "We apologize but it was only poor communication and it only impacted a small and insignificant part of the community".
This isn't an Olive branch. Its damage control with an attempt to change perception. Its not even remotely close to trying to right a wrong.
Its wild how the same people will complain that some corporate missive is completely content-free while at the same time punishing any attempt at earnest communication by scouring the missive for a raised edge to take offense at.
This is an example of my point actually - these types of posts are magnets for people that cannot be pleased.
They have public images here: https://hub.docker.com/u/httptoolkit
The original announcement said:
> If you don't upgrade to a paid subscription, Docker will retain your organization data for 30 days, after which it will be subject to deletion. During that period you will maintain access to any of your public images.
That sounds a lot like the public images were subject to deletion. At the very least, subject to being frozen in time and not updated/updateable, which can be worse in some cases.
To me this "This impacted less than x%" business is more of a classic Apple damage control PR statement, designed to convey to the whole userbase, "You almost definitely aren't affected, it's just a tiny number of whiners making all this fuss, and look how small they are!"
99% it is "the number of accounts affected" and not anything to do with number of downloads of images hosted there.
Their open source program [1] only grants a free 1-year Docker Team subscription. After which time the whole system is unusable. And most of those features aren't what open source teams even need which is surely just basic multi-user access.
They really should have just tightened the entry criteria for their open source offering if they were so concerned about it being misused.
https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-sponsored-open-source-pro...
As someone affected, I'm ok with paying.
* I don't like feeling tricked
* I don't like feeling held hostage
* Make your changes in a manner that preceding the announcement with "SURPRISE!" wouldn't be fitting
This was done with no notice--basically a bill for RIGHT NOW with no warning, and it seems that the only reason for that was greed? Docker just hit 100 million in ARR. I mean, really, you can't afford to role this out gracefully?!?
Side note - Google's "crane" CLI tool was marvelous for this purpose.
> Docker Pro is ideal for individual developers looking to accelerate productivity.
> Docker Team is ideal for small teams looking to collaborate productively.
> Docker Business is ideal for businesses looking for centralized management and advanced security capabilities. Visit our pricing page to learn more.
I'm not quite sure that answers the question, just how docker would like it's customers to self-discriminate.
When they did the "it's not free anymore" rugpull on Docker Desktop, I couldn't use it at work anymore since they wouldn't invoice us for less than a 50 seat license. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses won't buy things without invoicing for legal reasons.
It really upset me because I had a pretty solid workflow with docker desktop on a mac. Now I can't use that anymore. I am not surprised they continue to make foolish moves trying to monetize their software.
I get it, you need to monetize your software... but this is dumb.
Many months later, this is still proving to have been a good call.
Moral of the story: do not try to shove a category change on large corporations without having basic things large corporations routinely require in order to give you money, especially if replacing you requires a lot less spend on extra internal labor and material than you're demanding to be paid.
I see that they now have those things, but it would have been very clever to have asked a few potential customers about these things ahead of time, and made sure they had them as soon as they stuck their hands out... or had a few ex-corporate types around to run this all by before telling us that we will be buying Docker licenses within 120 days for everyone who happens to have Docker Desktop installed. At least they were savvy enough to realize that large companies couldn't have begun to cope with much less notice, but as it was, the rough start with a looming deadline was enough motivation to get us trying alternatives right away.
Why?
Because the consequences of getting this wrong can be far more expensive than whatever productivity gains you, the individual employee, claim to be achieving.
Docker, for example: we had absolutely no interest in individual users directly accessing their online features (we took a bit of trouble to block them, in fact), so theoretically, the free Personal licenses should have been fine. No.
Ok, so just have each Docker user pay that $5 themselves. How do we make sure every person who has Docker installed on their PC really is paying for a license? Even if we gave them all corporate cards, and Docker was going to be cool with several hundred accounts (or more) from the same domain not being on the "Business" plan, we then get to set up a process with Accounting to make sure the PC scans match the payments.
This might all sound ridiculous to start-up/boutique employees, but is a basic fact of life in corporate IT... which Docker was hoping to get a lot of money out of.
But why do we know what users have installed on the PCs assigned to them, aside from the licensing? When your product has a security hole (and unless your product never, ever talks to the Internet or other devices, it will someday), we need to know exactly who has it so that we can force them to patch. Again, tens of thousands of users with potentially thousands of products that need to have security issues tracked. Nightmare.
So if your custom software house** doesn't want to sell us your product in a way and provide management mechanisms that we feel comfortable with, then we'll find one of the many that does, or is happy to work with our preferred resellers. Or we will help departments redesign their processes to not need it.
Corporate IT cares deeply about what managers want, as they pay the bills. If they want your product for their subordinates, we will work to make that happen in a way that keeps our legal department and IT security management happy. Corporate IT cares deeply about users being able to use the products and services their managers are paying for. Corporate IT does not give a fig what individual users want, if they can't get their managers to pay for the cost of us dealing with that new product.
Negotiating license agreements and tracking usage, as I said before, is a full time job for several people. I am fortunately not one of them, but I've worked with them when supporting products within the company. Large companies do not employ these folks out of charity.
Corporate IT and corporate life is certainly not for everyone. Corporate IT doesn't work this way because we're humorless prigs; it works this way because there are billions in sensitive data and intricate production processes to protect, and tens of thousands of well-meaning folks who are competent in things other than infosec potentially providing network access to people who are not well-meaning.
If you want that sweet sweet corporate cash, figure out how to accommodate their purchase and IT management processes. Software resellers may be a good compromise. If you don't want to deal with corporate purchasing, don't be upset when a lot of your potential users end up with someone else's product.
** Anything smaller and more niche than SAP may as well be a "custom software house".
Legal is often still involved when it comes to new software products, because, among other things, there's GDPR. Oh, and Works Council.
My main point remains unchanged: relying on tens of thousands of end users to manage their licenses is something that large enterprises just can't do, so we end up with rules that seem draconian, and you, the hopeful seller of software/services to be used in corporate environments, will benefit from understanding how we work, even if you think it's stupid.
Yes, this happened to me. More than once.
No, you can’t just pull your wallet out and offer to pay for it yourself with cash. You’re not an “approved supplier” and it’s the supplier that needs to provide warranty support.
Also if you pay for it yourself, then you’re providing it as a “gift” and that could be construed as corruption — unless you’re reimbursed, but it’s above the threshold…
This whole thread has given me flashbacks to that time when the project manager broke down in tears and put his credit card back in his wallet…
You should not be giving your $x (it does not matter that its only 5) to the company.
It's always "we're sorry that we didn't communicate our bait and switch effectively". Not we're sorry that we pulled a bait and switch. We're sorry you didn't understand the value in this bait and switch. It's your fault, actually. But we're sorry you're angry. Now stop giving us negative attention.
Tell that to Silicon Valley Bank after that WSJ article that started the run lol
In an ideal free market with perfectly-rational omniscient actors, this issue wouldn't occur. I don't think you even need the omniscience: trust, memory, reputation/vouching and basic game theory should be sufficient (though I haven't proven this). Alternatively: a free market with contracts, where all things go through the system, would work.
In the real world, the system consists of people, each of whom is optimising for a particular thing. Very few people are optimising for "make the most money, at the expense of all else". Show me anyone (even a billionaire), and I'll show you somebody who values other things higher than the accumulation of money. And plenty of things don't go through "the system of capitalism": we have commons, and volunteers, and favours, and coerced unpaid labour / wage theft.
"The forces of capitalism" might be a good shorthand for the reasons behind this problem, but it's not strictly an accurate one: these issues aren't inherent to capitalism. They're not problems with capitalism, but problems with this system. (Capitalism does have other, different problems that are pretty baked in, like how capital is power and power lets you accrue capital, but I don't see how that relates to this issue.)
It is similar to pseudo-blameless engineering cultures, where engineers won't admit to bugs, or update the status indicator, least they face the shame of writing a post mortem, or having it brought up in their performance review.
Some MBA with a spreadsheet at Docker hasn't realized that where the upstream OSS goes, the rest follow.
If this move means that people have to now manage access to multiple registries like quay and ghcr, will that also incentivize people to go ahead and try migrating to these other registries. Especially given that dockers own registry has such poor permission management.
Docker registries are included with most cloud services (AWS, Azure, Gcloud, digital ocean) and you can use those to self host as well without too much issues. Github and gitlab offer docker registries as well. As do lots of other companies. Mostly, those services make money from other things than hosting docker images. That's just a low value commodity that they need to offer the really interesting stuff. If you are going to charge people for some expensive kubernetes cluster, they need a place to dump their container images. So you offer that for free. It's just a few GB of storage. It literally is a rounding error on the total bill. It does not matter. Charging for that does not make sense.
That's the problem docker has right now: they need companies to pay them absurd amounts of money for something that is essentially a low value commodity and they don't really have anything with a lot of value that they could charge for instead. And the harder they insist people need to pay, the more they erode their position as a leader in this space (which arguably they lost years ago). While it was free and convenient, people used them. But now that that's no longer the case, people engineer around them. They are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The one asset they still had (people treating them as the de-facto place to park docker containers) is basically being lost. And as soon as that stops, it's going to get harder for them to gain new customers or even retain existing ones.
Contrast that with Github that used to charge for stuff that they now give away for free. I paid for it back in the day. And now I don't. Except Github is making loads of money from companies that outgrow the freemium tier. And they have a steady supply of happy freemium users using their services for free transitioning to valuable paid services. And they get to host the entirety (well close to it) of the software developer population on this planet. It's the largest professional network outside of linkedin. Which of course MS also owns. It would be madness to incentivize users to not use that by charging for it. It's way too valuable for that.
Speaking of MS, they should just buy out Docker. Fire the management. Get rid of their sales department and revitalize docker and dockerhub development and integrate it into github. It's so complementary to Github that it's a no-brainer. And probably investors are getting fed up with the way things are going at docker. I imagine this could be a relatively cheap acquisition for them. This isn't OpenAI, LinkedIn, or Github.
If you don't meet the strict criteria of the Open Source Program, for example you are a for profit company publishing an open source image, you can't upload new versions of your public images. Your images are one CVE away from becoming useless.
If you do meet the criteria, they will build images for you. No way to have your own build process. All artifacts are made public.
* "public images will only be removed from Docker Hub if their maintainer decides to delete them"
* "Public images will only disappear if the maintainer of the image decides to proactively delete it from Docker Hub. If the maintainer takes no action, we will continue to distribute their public images."
This sounds good, but it would be better to explicitly say "if you opt to let your free organization be suspended, Docker Hub will continue distributing your public images indefinitely anyway". It feels like there's a loophole here where if a public image comes to have no maintainer - because they abandoned its organization - then it no longer benefits from this assurance. That seems unlikely, but given how this change has been going so far, it's tough to give Docker the benefit of the doubt.
Support request sent, I wish there were more clear on what "Topic" and "Severity" this kind of request falls into.
#HugOps to the tech support team that's going to be flooded with requests.
Also, just switch to Podman already people…
This company raised $400M+ and they cannot be arsed to implement a feature to change account types.
Docker's on the other hand is none of that, and full of corporate PR red flags:
- "This only impacted less than 2% of our users" signals that they're not really sorry. It tells me they see this as a 'loud minority' problem
- "This does not affect [list of 6 other types of subscriptions]" -> signals the post is partially being used to promote the other subscriptions. Reinforced by the "what are the benefits of a Docker subscription" at the bottom.
- It's still unclear (to me) what is the actual implication for some of the non-official open source projects here. On the one hand they say: "Public images will only disappear if the maintainer decides to proactively delete it from Docker Hub". Further down they mention "we will defer any organization suspension or deletion while the DSOS application is under review". Clearly they do intent to suspend organisations, but maybe let old images remain? Then the problem remains, as it prevents future updates.
Despite what it tries to say in words, (for me) this post just reinforces the initial signal of both not understanding and not caring about the open source usage.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044516
I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s minimizing. Don’t worry, it’s only 2%.
The problem is that’s 2% directly. If my organization has a Docker license, we’re not effected because we’re commercial.
But that’s not true is it? If we use Docker there is a very good chance that we use or base some of our images on open source images. We’re effected indirectly.
I admit it’s probably not possible to measure, maybe even estimate.
But the total number of organizations this change will be a problem for us way more than 2%. And they don’t want to admit it.
Also I don't think Docker grasps how much their users value a one way stop for pulling images of OSS.
It is a really stupid move.
Migrating to a free personal account will work for many small open source projects. That's what we're planning to do.
In all areas of the business, everyone should first be thinking, how does this impact the people using this thing? Have I talked to them? Do they understand what's happening? Do they have concerns? Have I fully addressed them? Is this going to make their lives harder, or will this be scary, or confusing?
It's my biggest pet peeve. Both as a user and an employee. If you don't take the time to care, it's really obvious, and an easy way to piss people off and inconvenience them. From a business perspective that drives customers to your competitors and makes employees quit. From a personal perspective, it's just a dick thing to do.
I don't care much of the business decision, it's their house.
I care for the persons I support whom use docker and I dont see a way to prepare them without sounding like a crackpot and looking like a fool if they after making noise turns out they aren't impacted.
1. Let any user have how many "free teams" they want, but restrict the image size (under 1GB?) and/or downloads (under 1,000/month?). Maybe let the community vote for open source images exempt from this restriction.
2. Run a free link redirect service: user registers my-team on hub.docker.com, links my-team/my-image with their preferred registry my-registry.com, client-side docker pull my-team/my-image resolves automagically to my-registry.com/my-team/my-image.