> businesses of fewer than than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in revenue

Seems like they can afford it.

To complete the context, both of those are required for free use of Docker Desktop; 250 employees and $1k revenue would still require you to license it.

EDIT: https://docs.docker.com/subscription/desktop-license/

That sounds like a bad business.

Or a government organisation. Or a charity.

Not-for-profit institutions are exempt.

Having worked in government, I don't see why they should be excluded from paying.

But I think a charity could fall under the 3rd one here.

"Examples of freely permitted usage include:

Personal projects with less than $10 million revenue per year Students and teachers (whether in an educational or professional setting) Research at not-for-profit institutions Personal contributions to non-commercial open source projects"

Second that. The crazy t&c required by gov have to be accounted for.

Which is fine.

250 employees earning the median US wage is 11 million per year to the employee before all sorts of overhead so more like 20 million in wages per year.

While true, many businesses are not US or staffed by the median waged US employee

250 employees earning the average AR wage (542400 ARS/year) is around 360000 USD per year. You can pay 10 average AR workers for the wage of a single US minimum wage worker.

Respectfully, I had no idea what you were talking about without a few google searches.

AR == Argentinian Peso

542k ARS == $1600 USD

So I guess I’ll ask some questions:

1) Is the Argentinian software labor pool large and organized enough to be accessible to international firms?

2) Is this the average wage of a software developer in Argentina? Or some larger group?

3) Why is this relevant in this discussion?

> AR == Argentinian Peso

Nope, ISO 4217 says it's ARS.

AR is the ISO 3166 contry code for Argentina.

> 1) Is the Argentinian software labor pool large and organized enough to be accessible to international firms?

Yes?

> 2) Is this the average wage of a software developer in Argentina? Or some larger group?

Average wage of Argentina.

> 3) Why is this relevant in this discussion?

People like to think people only live in the US.

I worked with some great Argentine contractors some years ago, I understand there is a nontrivial offshoring software labor pool.

There is a point that offshore contractors getting access to such software represents a ... larger proportion of compensation, especially among the several such SaaS per-user fees most tech companies will pay.

But there's also a counterpoint... docker wants somewhere between $5 and $30 US dollars per month per user, yes this is annoying because the value doesn't seem to be there for docker desktop which is all most people want anyway... on the other hand it's not such a moral issue... it's not much money at all.

>250 employees and $1k revenue

what is this, the world's most overstaffed lemonade stand?

Rarely does an HN comment make me laugh. Well done.

> Seems like they can afford it.

This is a low bar for ethical business practices.

If lure people to my ecosystem with low prices and then jack them up later when the switching costs are high, it's fine if they can afford it?

If the electric company jacked their rates by 10X for consumers who make over 100K a year would that be fine since "they can afford it"?

Yes, because they would lose all their customers to their competitors, which is exactly what has happened to Docker.

Electric company is a bad comparison because they’re a utility and you usually can’t switch.

If grocery store A started charging $30 for walking into the store, you better bet everyone’s gonna head to grocery store B.

I've been using Rancher Desktop for the past 6 months and I haven't missed Docker Desktop a single time.

Anyone know how does it compares to podman desktop?

I believe Rancher desktop has more of an out-of-the-box focus on Kubernetes, it uses Rancher's k3s and whatnot. Podman desktop treats k8s as more of an optional thing, e.g. you use Kind to create a cluster.

Of course there are also organizational differences, Podman seems to be more of a community led open-source project whereas Rancher is ultimately trying to sell enterprise kubernetes management software.

In my experience, k3s looks great on the surface but I ran into quite a few issues operating it in a single-node use case.

If I was looking into this today, I'd definitely explore Podman/Kind instead.

That’s good info. Thanks!

It's one checkbox to disable k3s, I don't need it as the rare times I need to test something in k8s I do it in the dev environment.

The main rationale for using Rancher is that the CLI is the same as Docker. No modification to any script was needed.

Podman might be better, I can't say, but for what I use it for it doesn't really matter.

I’ve had good luck with ubuntu multipass as a docker desktop replacement on macos:

https://ubuntu.com/blog/replacing-docker-desktop-on-windows-...

It runs on windows too.

Yeah some of my colleagues missed the memo and we got the extortion attempt. The crazy thing is the part of the company that want you to pay the troll is not the same as the field sales.

That’s probably the most noxious business model ever. I’ve dealt with 5-6 companies doing that, and whenever renewal/retention is a different sales organization, i spin up a company project to plan the exit strategy.

The nickel and dime cost stuff is one thing, but the bigger problem is that these companies and products always decline.

Aren’t most sales teams separate from customer success? Can you expand on this insight?

Did you mean 'customer support'?

Probably not. Customer success are teams dedicated to keeping customers happy and paying and finding ways to ensure that they remain customers. Customer support is typically who you contact when you don't have any leverage and encounter a problem.

If you spend a million dollars a year on a contract, you will typically have someone you know by name and meet with regularly who will legitimately hear your feedback and work to resolve your problems.

How is that not just another name for customer support? They're both kinds of support for the customer, even if one has a more palatable name. In my experience, one is simply an alias for the other, as the sibling commenter notes, I have not seen those two roles split out.

In my own experience, I've seen them as distinct groups from customer support both at the companies I've worked for and companies I've worked with. I view it more as an alias to account rep, but sometimes people account reps will delegate to.

Customer support will file a ticket for me when something isn't working. Maybe help if something on their script matches existing known issues. Customer success will proactively see that I'm not getting the expected value from my already committed spending and utilization and reach out to make sure everything is configured right so that I renew next year.

I see what you mean. In my experience, I've seen those usually be called account representatives as you mentioned, while customer success was still just customer support under another name.

Customer success is an alias of customer support.

Podman has been a very straightforward drop-in replacement for Docker at my company. Even if that didn't work out, things like Linux namespaces, chroot, bubblewrap, and so on are all beautifully well-documented, battle-tested tools.

Docker has no moat.

Well the Linux side has plenty of good alternatives and has had them for years, but good luck with MacOS or Windows users. Many of them just can't be bothered to understand how these technologies work.

They just want an easy installer that lets them "run docker containers" and they don't want to even think about a Linux VM. Even many developers can't be bothered to deal with this stuff and just want some easy abstraction. This is where Docker Desktop has value and why some people will continue paying for it.

Docker is still free.

it is only Docker Desktop which is no longer free.

most power users do not use or need Docker Desktop.

The desktop application is the easiest way to get up and running on Mac or Windows where a VM is necessary. Of course you can still set up docker engine manually in a VM, but even then it doesn't offer the same level of integration, like host mounts, Rosetta on Mac. Desktop Linux is the only environment where the desktop app offers little benefit over just running the engine.

I always forget there's people who do software development on something other than Linux.

I mean I use Windows too (my laptop has poor Linux support, plus Proton wasn't a thing when I bought it so I went for something which is guaranteed to run games well). But I do all my development in a Linux VM in Virtualbox. If you have an SSD, performance is indistinguishable from native.

> If you have an SSD, performance is indistinguishable from native.

In my experience this is very much not the case. Running a graphical linux desktop in a VM on beefy hardware still introduces noticeable keypress latency for me, as an example.