I have always felt that was strange how quickly people started taking Docker for granted, while simultaneously relying on them completely but also somehow dismissing their core utility as a trivial and unsophisticated layer or something.
It's like they never really got credit from most people on HN or are worthy of getting paid, even though most everyone uses their technology.
The way I see it, Docker can’t both have their cake and eat it. They can’t both get the nice PR and goodwill of claiming to provide free access to open source, and also not do it (and require them to pay to keep using it in the existing capacity).
Fine if they don’t want to provide a free service, but then they shouldn’t be able to claim to do so either.
The implied question is whether or not they should _continue_ to do it in perpetuity. If docker did a cost:benefit of the program and decided it wasn’t worth it (maybe they didn’t get that much good PR after all?) it’s their prerogative to end it.
There’s a perfectly valid gripe about the lack of communication, just as a matter of courtesy; but again, taking from their very own post, docker (the company) has historically burned their hands on proactive communication before.
I didn't find the article to be scolding or offensive in their tone. It's just a straight reporting of their experience and (imho valid) concerns.
People got Docker for granted because startups and modern sysadmins absolutely despised installing software on physical or VM servers. On tech side, Vagrant was making VMs easier, plus BSD had jails, and Linux needed something similar. So they found a legit gap in the stack, and timed it well.
Who wants to spend 3 hours to install a service while they can make it appear out of thin air in 40 seconds and deal with the shortcomings and consequences later, or containerize an application, disregard hard requirements and tell "just add an X container in front" (I'm not telling that this is good, BTW).
So Docker spread like wildfire and graduated to invisible/boring tech in 3 months straight. Then when the people demanded money from developers for what they built for them, people grabbed the forks, or created literal forks of the software. I support the latter approach, not the former one.
However, if they advertise a DSOS program, they should do what it entails. Be transparent, fair and open about it.
Containers also predated "modern sysadmins"; prior to docker, Google ran its prod software in chroots for the same reasons as above:
>The software run by the server is typically run in a chroot with a limited view of the root partition, allowing the application to be hermetic and protected from root filesystem changes. We also have support for multiple libcs and use static linking for most library uses. This combination makes it easy to have hundreds of different apps with their own dependencies that change at their own pace without breaking if the OS that boots the machine changes.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/lisa13/lisa13...
It has its own flaws, but it was so much better than the alternatives.
How hard can it be to show some basic decency and courtesy?
I've been related several times about people that wanted explicit reasons of why they've been rejected, and ending up mad at the (perceived as dishonest) hard truths they've been told, and anything said delicately can be dismissed, seen as cryptic or even displayed as hypocrisy.
Courtesy is hard, and all are not well equipped to see it when it's given.
I managed a hiring process last year (my first) and from the outset I wanted to make sure I let every applicant that we talked to know if we had decided to pass. It was a lot easier said/thought than done.
That email is horrible to send. My stomach dropped out every time I hit “send”, for exactly the reasons you stated. I dreaded the replies which often included some kind of “Why?” question.
I completely understand where the candidates are coming from. They want to know what they did wrong and how they can improve. On the surface this seems like an easy thing to do, but in my experience, it’s more like opening a can of worms. How do you tell someone “I’m sorry, you’re too junior, try again in a few years” or “your entire personality was off-putting/rude” or “you spent an inordinate amount of time in the interview tying to convince me I was wrong about tabs vs spaces and even sent me a follow up email citing more reasons” or “You told me you worked with PHP 6 when I asked you what version you had used” [0], or “you couldn’t remember if you used Angular 1 or 2+” [1], or “you told me you had a great memory then proceeded to say ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t remember’ to 90% of my questions”…. The list goes on
When sending a rejection letter the best case scenario is that they say “thank you” and move on (or don’t reply at all). Worst case scenario, they start asking follow-up questions which I feel obligated to respond to, they get irate, and/or they attempt some kind of bargaining/arguing. I’m not going to say I’d never do any of these things myself (however unproductive) but it shocks me that some people think they can change your mind by arguing about why you passed on them.
It’s all very uncomfortable and feels like you are navigating a field of land mines.
[0] PHP 6 never was released, it went from 5->7, though you can find books on “PHP 6” because they were printed before it was clear the version was going to be skipped.
[1] Angular 1 vs 2+ is essentially a completely different framework. Anyone working in web tech should be aware of that fact.
Still, i think we should expect better of companies and candidates on both ends.
Courtesy starts with the giver. If someone chooses to not be equipped, then you have done your job by attempting courtesy, nothing more is required.
While there's a lot of awful behavior, I have found complete silence (no initial rejection) triggers worse behavior. For example, silence leads to people constantly reaching out, rightfully wanting to know status. Moreover, it greatly encourages the psychotic people to bombard you with craziness via any means of contact. For that reason, an initial response that a person is rejected is enough typically.
Courtesy is not hard and saying so is concerning. While people may have different reactions, a simple sentence is a courtesy and a thank you, nothing beyond that is required. Still, I admit reading this site sometimes makes me think basic humanity is a challenge for many people. Unfortunately, those people seem to be in charge of hiring at many companies.
All you have to do in a job context is respond at least once - thank you, but no. If the other person does not see a simple email as courtesy, that is their problem. A response is a universal courtesy, no response is a universal insult. I can understand not wanting to engage further, however.
No response at all is also demeaning. It takes seconds to formulate an initial rejection response. If someone presses you, simply reply with that dreaded canned response + simply use their name. If you want to further personalize things in either case, you pick 1 detail you remember to sound more genuine, which for a functioning human should be quite easy.
If you want something more dry in a follow-up, you can say that for legal reasons, you are not allowed or comfortable discussing further, but you wish the person luck. That covers all the normal people, and for crazies, you have no choice either way but at least this has a chance of getting them to go away. What you are saying is that people are not even worth seconds of your time, especially people who potentially invested hours, weeks, or even months in the process. I would hope any reasonable person is above this.
Lastly, a response is important because it allows people to prioritize and further their job search. If you keep someone hanging, it can have huge implications that I should not have to explain. There are many other problems it can cause as well. As an example, I once applied for a job I thought I wanted because the company confused me with someone else and their SOP was silence. They stopped responding to my inquiries which insulted me so much, I rejected their subsequent offer when the mistake was caught. Another example - a company scheduled interviews for me and just didn't show up, making me have to leave my wife alone in the hospital at the time which I only did because my job search was that important at that time financially.
Honestly, I'm so tired of the attitude of companies and people on here validating unprofessional and awful behavior. If it were legal and without issue, I'd make a list and publicly shame. The only redemption is that when someone can't even be human enough to respond to you, working at their company would be a miserable experience. Still, that does not help when you waste weeks, months, or even years going through this nonsense with ego tripping weirdos doing hiring these days, ghost jobs, and complete psychos. I've been interviewing candidates for over 20 years and I do not say this lightly that the current process is disgusting, awful, and unacceptable at a disturbingly large number of companies.
I live in a place where I don’t have to worry about such lawsuits so I did give negative feedback, and most frequently the kind of people who apply to jobs they are obviously unqualified for are not the kind of people who take negative feedback well. They would rather argue with you.
The public sphere has been polluted to such an extent that these days I no longer openly advertise for jobs and instead go through contacts, luckily I don’t need many people so it remains a viable approach.
Regarding the larger issues, I have diffused the legal issue in the past to some degree simply by stating, "Legally, I can't discuss this with your further, however I wish you luck" or less directly, "Thank you for inquiring. As a policy, we don't discuss rejections, however I wish you luck." Many people will simply fold, while the crazy people are going to be crazy no matter what, but at least you tried to address people who are genuinely asking for feedback in a polite way that doesn't forever tarnish you.
I have started going out of my way to spread the word in my network about certain companies who behave poorly in the hiring process, however, even if it did not involve me directly. I will not do business with these companies, use their products and libraries (when possible), and recommend against colleagues joining when they come to me for advice, recommendations, or feedback. I encourage others to actually hold people responsible for sh*t behavior. This of course goes both ways for employers and applicants.
For business matters, it's just common courtesy to not leave someone hanging.
But you're not ripping the bandaid off, you're ignoring it and hoping that it will fall off on its own.
And rejection is noisy and wasteful. And companies can't really be honest in this situation anyway, so it's pointless.
So I like the Hollywood approach: Don't call us, we'll call you.
If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
Storage, compute, and traffic, isn't free. You've been the beneficiary of charity for years.
Yes, the open source community has relied on this implicit charity as a parasite, by exploiting whatever free services they could. And now we're paying the price, as you say, by having DockerHub as the default provider.
My suggestion is therefore that we need independent solutions, that are fully funded as a charity, and stop relying on freemium services from corporations that fundamentally don't care about the public good.
It's like how WordPress have benefitted from people authoring plugins – even though wordpress.org has hosted them for "free", this has been good commercial sense as it allows them to sell more WordPress.com to people.
With seemingly similar rent-seeking behaviour when Automattic decide they’ve had enough and want to put a toll on that road…
Again in the case of social platforms: for the longest time this was framed as user entitlement if anyone didn’t like it. Which failed to see the other side. Yes, the users wanted something free but the company also got something back from the user.
We could go back and forth on details like the service growing to such a point that the free service becomes too much of a burden on them. But consider the case when the free service was treated by the business as an investment for $X which was supposed to carry that cost until the proverbial rug could be pulled from the users without a mass exodus—grow your user base until you have enough of a mass to demand a considerable escape velocity in order to be avoided.
Again, arguments could be made either way. But it is definitely not as simple-cut as an altruistic service versus selfish users/consumers.
I’m sure someone versed in Economics could summarize the above in a phrase or a sentence.
Isn't compatibility issues a major problem for alternative registries?
It takes a whole lot of mental gymnastics to argue that a provider of free services is actually the one benefitting from that interaction, and not the other way around.
Go ahead and build your systems on free dependencies like WordPress and Debian, but just get real and don't pretend that you are better than professionals that build business relationships and actually pay for their software dependencies like RHEL and Webflow.
This blog is for LinuxServer.io, who build repositories that produce free docker images, for free, paid for by donations, for a bunch of open source software. By the looks of things, they are literally a charity.
Conversely, their complaint is not "aren't docker rubbish? Let's mob 'em" - it's "heads up, something seems to be wrong and docker are not responding to anything, chances are there's trouble brewing - we're gonna start looking around and if you're depending on this, you should too"
I would say calling "the open source community" a "parasite" because they're using free services from companies that have benefited greatly and earned a lot of money from things given freely by the open source community seems weird.
Seems like a lot of people on here very concerned about those poor struggling corporations, and their exploitation by those evil open source charities. Feels like an evil political wind is blowing, wonder where that's coming from?
It sounds to me like their ultimate goal is to get more free stuff.
And I'm saying: open source should not rely on benevolent corporations.
And writing articles to beg for services is not a healthy strategy in the long term.
Instead: use open standards, don't rely on centralized infrastructure, create a marketplace for providers, and create a better future. Stop maintaining the status quo of indentured servitude.
They don't whine because they didn't get DSOS status this year. They are confused because they didn't get an answer.
They want communication, not free cookies.
It sounds more to me like those who run DockerHub aren't that interested in giving away free service.
Very loaded language you use, when, typically, commercial software relies on Open Source software and community efforts as a parasite.
If Docker advertises an open source program, it’s completely fair to be critical if they’re not delivering as advertised.
So you're right in that sense. It's essentially blackmail: free services in exchange for staying silent.
I think it's unhealthy.
And I argue that we need properly funded, independent services, with clear motives.
We had that already, but none of them invented Docker.
> If you want free stuff, is your strategy to smear them into giving you more free stuff?
They seem happy to pay; they were complaining (validly) about the process of renewing DSOS.
I think that depends on what you mean by docker. Lots of similar things existed before, just less formalized and less centralized.
Those who can grasp the complexity of needing an ecosystem for modern technology to exist foster it and those who think strictly along the lines of profitability and short sighted morals are the unwitting beneficiaries of things they don't understand.
We don't "want free stuff", we pay for docker hub for several accounts, but they offer and promote an Open Source program that we have been part of, that simply does not function properly, and that is our complaint.
Your attitude of "well it's free so it's fine if it's shit, just go somewhere else" is wildly unhelpful to everyone.
Docker literally offers free stuff if you follow their process. They followed the process and have gotten silence in return. Somehow that doesn't strike me as "smear them into giving you more free stuff".
Don't say you're going to do a thing if you're not going to do the thing.
- free usage is capped and throttled if you exceed download limits.
- some cloud environments don't pay for docker hub access and it's easy to exceed those limits collectively. I've seen that happen on telekom cloud a few times.
- you can configure docker on your machine to use a mirror. For example https://mirror.gcr.io. Or you can setup your own mirror of course. Most cloud environments do this for you.
Using a mirror means you can continue to use images published (by others) to docker hub. And since you don't really have much of a choice about where others publish their images, using a mirror is a good workaround.
IMHO the docker solution of simply prepending images with your registry domain is actually a decent practice. I don't get websites I browse from a central repository either.
For your own stuff, you don't really need to use dockerhub. You can just run your own repository, which isn't that hard or expensive. But of course, an empty repository isn't that useful if you mainly use stuff made by others.
Btw. docker is not unique with having a corporately owned central repository of software. Annoyingly, maven central is run by Sonatype and their process for pushing stuff there is mildly convoluted. It's stupidly easy to use a simple aws or gcp bucket as a maven repository from gradle (I do this for some of my OSS projects). Or any old server with ssh access and a web server. Github also offers repositories for a lot of stuff. But getting your library on maven central just means dealing with their bureaucracy (Jira driven!) and jumping through a lot of hoops. I've been wishing somebody would beat some sense into them or would setup a (vastly) easier to use public repository for years.
It's nice that companies offer public repositories of stuff. But it's inconvenient when they start policing/taxing access to that or put up barriers to get stuff in there. Mainly because they tend to host the vast majority of interesting dependencies that you might want to use.
IMHO the ownership of such central infrastructure ideally moves to some kind of foundation with proper governance rather than some company. For docker that could be the Linux Foundation. It's not clear to me why that responsibility lies with a tiny company for the Java ecosystem that makes a rather convoluted product for hosting jar files which at this point isn't actually that widely used since there are plenty better alternatives. Nothing against them but why delegate such a big responsibility to them?
FROM Debian
CMD apt-get install thing
CMD curl blabla/install.sh
Pretty much converts to:
aws-cli ec2 launch-instance
ssh user@server apt-get install thing
ssh user@server curl blabla/install.sh
In general, everytime you dispense of a high level abstraction, the solution is not to replicate the high level abstraction, but to build directly at a lower level abstraction.
If you want to replace burgers, just buy a slab of meat and put it in the fire or bake your own bread. You don't need to make preservants and buy artificial sweeteners, etc...
How many times faster and more reproducible is "docker run myimage:1.0.0" compared to your solution?
But I fully agree with you. Likely what you need is a tiny subset of the capabilities wrapped up by the higher level abstraction, so implement them directly.
Over time you may find you need additional capabilities (although that's far from a given) and, if and when you do, you'll need to make decisions about whether to implement them directly, or wrap everything in a higher level abstraction (or use a third party abstraction).
The point is that if you ever do need these additional capabilities there's a good chance it's because you've been successful enough to enter "good problem to have" territory because you didn't waste time getting distracted by them earlier on and instead chose to focus on work that enabled that success.
Containers aren’t the only solution to every problem but they’re a decent hammer for a lot of nails.
I'm not only using containers to deploy my VPSes.
Thank you for trying.
P.S. at least use something declarative and provider-agnostic like terraform.
JFrog charges loads of money for Artifactory, btw
The format is not hard to implement either for basic storage.
Instead of all the snide remarks I’ll offer another possible solution:
Contact sales for Docker Business, first state your interest in the business enterprise plan, maybe even make some statements about how it would benefit you, but also during the sales/discovery/demo process note the problems you’re having as a free organization and how they have to be resolved before you can move forward.
Once the sales team prods the right people to fix your problem, continue wasting their time a little more as punishment and then tell them sorry, we went with another vendor.
...not disagreeing with the approach. :) I swear something like half of my problems in life can be boiled down to poor/absent communication. If you're going to LARP as a grown-up company, as Docker seems to be, then you need to do the work and respond to the emails. Even from the freebie customers.
But if that’s the case that they offer a free tier/open source project tier without support they shouldn’t offer a service that isn’t 100% self-service.
We control our image registry. So should you.
They are a couple of guys trying to make software more accessible to thousands of people. Indeed it's a large project and one may question if they should get _everything_ for free. But that's not the point of this article. The article is about the absolutely horrendous behaviour of the company running Docker Hub. And I totally relate to this as I applied for a project of mine, too. How they run their open source program, it feels nothing more like presenting themselves as the big open source supporters, but in fact they make it extra hard for those who already maintain software for free.
They've ignored their application. That hardly qualifies as "horrendous".
Don't you believe in freedom?
It's fair to criticize them for monopolistic practices and creating a closed ecosystem. But if you want social goods (enforced through social norms), then the company should be publicly owned, not private.
Many containers hosted by this project have the sole purpose of pirating media, so maybe it's not even Docker's choice to ignore the project. If they're being sued for providing piracy tools (and are smart enough to shut up about it until the lawyers clear them) it'd be stupid to explain what's going on and why. Last thing they'd need is for the copyright lawyers to make it seem like Docker is directly in kahoots with the piracy ecosystem. I'm not condemning piracy tools here, but everyone knows what you should expect if you're hosting piracy adjacent services.
It was pretty cool of them to offer DSOS to open source projects but I guess that's coming to an end if they don't even bother replying to their form anymore. But it's not like Docker is known to the public for giving other projects free hosting, the only reliable free hosting Docker provides are the containers they put under their own name spaces. It sucks people fall for the openwashing these large technology companies do, but I think people have unusually high expectations of Docker here.
What I specifically meant by horrendous was not only that they ignore one project. Unfortunately, I made similar experiences with my little project. They don't reply to emails, the application process is mediocre at best and the last time my projects' org got a renewal for the program, they mixed up accounts and first wanted to charge me for a team plan. Thank god someone noticed this on their side and fixed it. But all in all, a subpar experience. My expectation would be that someone at Docker takes care of this in an honest and professional manner. As of today, this seems to be not the case.
If the phrase absolutely horrendous behaviour maps to this triviality instead of actual atrocities, you have gotten too deep and lost context.
I don't want to discredit any small issues by putting them into global perspectives, but there's several wars as we speak, maybe just tone down your alarm levels if you want to be taken seriously.
