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Software Businesses Operating Systems

Docker Desktop No Longer Free For Large Companies (theregister.com) 63

Posted by BeauHD from the search-for-sustainability dept.
Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model. The Register reports: The company has renamed its Free plan to "Personal" and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop. There are no changes to the command-line Docker Engine. The $5/month Pro and $7/month Teams subscriptions continue as before, but a new $21/month Business subscription adds features including centralized management, single sign-on, and enhanced security.

The Docker platform has a number of components, of which Docker Desktop is just one part. Docker images define the contents of containers. Docker containers are runnable instances of images. The Docker daemon is a background application that manages and runs Docker images and containers. The Docker client is a command-line utility that calls the API of the Docker daemon. Docker registries contain images, and the Docker Hub is a widely used public registry. Much of Docker (but not Desktop) is open source under the Apache v2 license. Docker Desktop is a GUI tool for managing various Docker components and functions, including containers, images, volumes (storage attached to containers), local Kubernetes, development environments within containers, and more. Whereas most Docker components are available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and despite the fact that most Docker containers run on Linux, Desktop is only available for Windows and Mac. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says the changes will help the company address security challenges with the software supply chain. It'll also help create a viable business model.

"We continue to see growth in the developer market. The latest stat we have is that by 2030 there's going to be 45 million global developers, up from 18-some million today... that requires us to have a business that is sustainably scalable," Johnston told The Register.
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Docker Desktop No Longer Free For Large Companies More

Docker Desktop No Longer Free For Large Companies

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  • Not as interested as I once was (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @05:48PM (#61750009) Homepage

    I've used Docker for a number of projects. It's cool, but the price keeps going up. Is it really worth that cost, instead of just automating deployments? Maybe for some companies, but for a lot of them, probably not.

    • I only use the command-line because it's more practical to automate. And a bit easier to search online for how to do things. Docker's "Desktop" app is a GUI and not much use to me.

      An alternative to docker is "podman" and in some ways it is better because it doesn't require a daemon to work. You can safely run it as an unprivileged user.

      • Docker's "Desktop" app is a GUI and not much use to me.

        Unfortunately it's the only way to get Docker on the Mac.

        It's no big loss on my Linux systems -- they're all running the OSS CLI client/server. But the only way to get the CLI natively on Mac is via installation of Docker Desktop. It's not available separately.

        Yaz

        • I had no idea, did the builds [docker.com] stop working?

          • My understanding is the builds work fine, but they're not sufficient to build a usable container runtime. I've been told (but can't verify myself at this time) that the HyperKit interface code that actually allows you to run a container on Mac isn't OSS. But I haven't tried it myself, and so will likely start looking into it to see if that is indeed the case or not in the next week or two.

            Yaz

    • Operating Systems use to come with development tools. Well, most still do except for windows unless you count .BAT files and Powershell scripts. However I find it odd, that there is so much effort in a fancy UI, that they have taken out much of our ability to automate tasks.

      I have found I am often better off to go back to a traditional program vs writing a script, because of the complexity of navigating a GUI.

      • I can see you haven't done much Windows development lately. There is a wealth of free automation tools, both created by Microsoft and by others. The development tools might not come with Windows, but they are free to anyone who cares to download them. Deployment of .NET applications has become quite straightforward, usually little more than copying the compiler output folder to the destination server. Microsoft's tools have built-in environment management, making it easy to do configuration overrides that a

        • .NET is not straight forward. At least not compared to say Python or going back to BASIC. .NET is Object Oriented which is fine for those of us with Computer Science Degrees, and for those use to thinking like that it is easy to us. But we need more simple languages for those who don't program applications, but just want the computer to do a task.

          Yes they are Microsoft provided tools, but I still call them third party, because they didn't come with the OS. and gives people that functionality out of the b

          • I don't disagree with you (other than calling Visual Studio a third-party tool).

            However, since the topic at hand is Docker, we're not really talking about casual development by people who "just want to have a computer complete a task." Docker is useful only to advanced developers who need to do real, controlled deployments at scale. If you're a casual developer, you definitely don't need Docker.

  • In case you need an alternative, minikube is close. I also expect an open source equivalent will show up soon. Anyone know of one?

    • No - minikube is not an alternative. Its a scaled down version of kubernetes and a prereq for it is a container runtime like docker. If you don't want to be dependent on docker, then you need to be thinking along the lines of podman (or its associated tools like buildah, skopeo, crictl etc - depending on your use case) or rkt (rocket).

      • Kubernetes is “Docker” with a capital “D”’s main alternative. If you want to run Kubernetes locally than minikube is likely the best option.

        Podman is another way to run the same OCI images, it excels at running one-offs on a local computer but is less useful for deployments. Generally deploying something with postman means wrapping it in Kubernetes.

    • Does anyone compile static binaries? My understanding is that docker was created to fix the shit show dependency hell. Because no one outside of the original dev can recreate the build environment.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Yeah, me. I once mentioned to a boss that your stuff depending critically on the environment is a problem. Naturally nobody did anything. Then it turned out they'd turned in a bunch of wrong clinical trial results because one of the things in their spaghetti of binaries floating in Perl scripts discarded all minus signs unless a particular environment variable was set a particular way.

        Oops.

      • I have been distributing static binaries for an application for many years now - it always works fine. I don't understand why it is discouraged.

        • I tend to discourage the use of static binaries, mostly because of experience of solutions that are often 10, 20, 30+ years old. Where a particular binary program was written as a temporary fix to a problem, which has became a vital component to the infrastructure, where after decades of use, it needs to be upgraded, or sometimes just recompiled (say from going from a 16bit to a 64bit compatible binary). Where the source code has long sense been lost, or is saved as code.vb or something unable to find, un

        • It's fine in some cases. But not others. Here are the 3 traditional reasons.

          * Can't do that easily in managed environments like C# or Java or Python, though with some effort you can come close.

          * More resource usage, although this may or may not matter depending on the situation. This also encourages small numbers of huge monolithic apps rather than lots of smaller ones that honor the single-responsibility principle.

          * You don't benefit from security or performance improvements in updated OS libraries, unl

      • Not just the build environment. The deployment environment for one thing. And not just thing like shared libraries, other dependencies, configuration, etc., but pretty much everything.

        This is a setback for the Windows containerization story since in Windows-land people have less familiarity and comfortability with the command line, even though in most respects it is not much different than Linux (and perhaps not at all if your workloads run under Linux containers, WSL, etc.).

        But there are alternatives, in

  • Fork incoming (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @05:53PM (#61750035)

    Will be forked faster than you can say "MariaDB".

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Virtucon ( 127420 )

      call it "Ever Given?"

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by x0ra ( 1249540 )
      Just use "podman".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        Nah, I use black Levi's 501s instead of Dockers.

        They're more comfortable, and you don't look like some fashion obsessed dweeb.

        hawk, who never expected to see a thread about pants on netback, unless it was about the fact that they don't exist in nethack . . .

    • No, almost nobody uses "Docker Desktop." The parts people actually use are Apache 2 licensed.

  • This is a good thing (Score:4, Funny)

    by Aristos Mazer ( 181252 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @06:04PM (#61750057)

    So many companies and platforms rely upon Docker, it would be collectively very expensive if they went out of business. They need a viable business model in order to keep going. I'm glad they're going to keep the cheap entry level stuff.

    • My company (recently acquired startup) uses Docker, but the only things we use are the public registry for some very common images (Alpine, Node) and Docker Desktop. We use AWS ECR for or own images, and ECS for deployment. Since we're now owned by a large company, this would cost us >$250/yr per developer, exceeding the combined cost of GitHub, Slack, and Confluence. There's a grace period until January, so either someone will create a new Docker Desktop that's free, or we'll switch to using Docker Mach

      • you can setup an free nexus repository with docker mirror.

      • Our build jobs already fail several times a month because the Docker Hub auth server stops responding.

        Setup an EC2 instance inside AWS and install the free version of Nexus. It has a built-in Docker Hub Proxy, that will drastically limit the number of times you have to go out and hit the Docker Hub directly for images.

        We had the same issue daily with GitLab Runner jobs pulling docker:latest for every commit; took less than a day to get Nexus installed and running (inside a Docker container), and haven't had a problem since.

        Yaz

      • If Docker wants to make money they should try offering something of value.

        That no one else offers, or that is better than what other folks offer.

        Though it is generally difficult to monetize Free/Open Source software, so, in most cases, it is services, not solely software, that financially successful FOSS companies have been able to monetize.

  • do you need to buy for all users in your corp?
    now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees
    so even if just you have 10 dev's but other people who don't do docker work you need to pay up to $21/mo employee?

    If just say you have 10 dev's and 300 retail / factory people who don't any docker work?

    • > If just say you have 10 dev's and 300 retail / factory people who don't any docker work?

      If all you end of those devs are busy doing Docker deployments and all ten "devs" are using the GUI, to do it, then you'd pay $5/dev = $50.

      Of course, of none of your ten devs is capable of typing "docker run" and needs a GUI for that, you have other problems.

      • requires that businesses with 250 or more employees how do they count an employee?? and do they do audits with big lawsuits?

        • I'm not sure what exactly you're at, but if you're not sure whether you have more 250 employees, and your business relies on Docker Desktop, pitch it the $5/developer to help keep Docker going. Your developers restroom breaks cost a heck of a lot more than $5 (in lost time).

      • It's not entirely clear how to start docker-engine and have it use HyperKit on macOS. Not having to research/tinker with that plus easy installation plus update notifications is worth $5/mo. Even if using the command line for everything else.

        To me, saving $5/mo by making installation more complicated, taking up time that could be spent developing, and creating a requirement for more internal developer support is a false economy.

        If I'm using software for something important, I like it to have a visible and s

        • That's a good point. *IF* it saves developer time, it's worth $5/month.

          I can so most things faster CLI that GUI. But I'm weird.

        • It's not entirely clear how to start docker-engine and have it use HyperKit on macOS.

          That's because AFAIK the parts of Docker Desktop Mac that provide these services haven't been Open Sourced -- and so unless you intend to write your own implementation and make the necessary changes to the Docker Engine to use them, you're stuck with Docker Desktop.

          Yaz

  • ... businesses with 250 or more employees, ...

    Good thing my company a group of 1000 companies of 249 employees each and not one company of 249,000 employees ...

  • My job is certainly going to add this to the list of stuff they scan for in their endpoint compliance checks. Similarly had to remove Oracle JDK a while back. As long as there is a similarly easy way to keep docker and kubernetes working on my mac I won't mind.

    • I do wonder the same - I have Docker Desktop, as it's "the way" to install Docker on a mac. However, I use the "desktop" of it maybe once in a blue moon - usually only to update the bloody desktop app. 90% of the stuff you want to do with docker isn't available in the desktop app, so losing it would be no hardship at all.

      As much as DockerCorp need to make some money somewhere, I can't help but wonder if they've lost their way a bit with this one...? Perhaps they started believing all the "feedback" they kee

  • The main issue is that Docker has died long ago, during the VC funding craze. Instead of focusing on a sustainable and reliable core, they went off to try all kinds of nonsense (Swarm, Compose, etc.). None of that really stuck (except for Compose which is often used for testing).

    Meanwhile, there are open issues with the core that have seen zero changes for 5 years. Like ability to add volatile RUNs, or IPv6-based selective port exposure. Or the latest: how the fuck can we get the intermediate image IDs wh

    • They needed to try different things, because there isn't a use case for having a whole company around what is actually a fairly thin OSS tool.

      The sooner they crash and burn, the sooner they hand maintenance off to something like the Linux Foundation, and then fixing open issues will be easier.

  • Good thing Kubernetes abandoned Docker (Score:3)

    by kriston ( 7886 ) on Tuesday August 31, 2021 @08:51PM (#61750475) Homepage Journal

    Good thing Kubernetes abandoned Docker in favor of containerd recently.

  • Big companies will just roll their own

  • I can't wait for a free alternative which isn't a slow and horrible Chromium based UI. As I'm locked to a Windows environment I cannot really get around installing it.

  • I'm always amused when people sell features of the linux kernel that could be harnessed by two dozen bash code (in this case, namespaces and cgroups) as corporate products. Kind of like a pimp selling the bridge the girl's waiting on...

    Gotta grab some popcorn now :-)

    • I played with namespacing a long time ago (before we had docker, etc)
      Couldn't quite do it with a bash script, but it took all of 5 minutes to write a clone(2) call wrapper to throw the new init in its own namespace.

      It always amazed me that such heavy and ugly tools sprouted up out of the muck to manage this.

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