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Relying on a free service for important work? Maybe they are right.


Silly us, I suppose we should stop relying on APT/RPM/what-have-you Linux package mirrors, NPM, NuGet, PyPi, Hex, RubyGems, Crates, ... too.


No. There's a huge difference between a volunteer driven organization and a for-profit company.

Their goals are completely different. The latter is not there to give you services. It's there to maximize shareholder value.

It's sad to see that HN can't even tell the difference anymore.


Neither npm nor NuGet are volunteer driven organizations. npm is owned by Github, NuGet is owned by Microsoft, and I'm sure that there are dozens of other examples behind many key pieces of free dev&ops infrastructure that are owned by for-profit companies.

Are they allowed to do it? Of course! Are we allowed them to call them out on their bait & switch tactics? Of course, what else are we supposed to do?

Just because something is common, like building a user base based on implicit promises and then pulling the rug once the service reaches critical mass, doesn't mean it should be accepted and normalized.


> npm is owned by Github

And GitHub is owned by Microsoft, duh. And they don't do this stuff out of the kindness of their hearts.

> what else are we supposed to do?

How about not falling for the same trap again and again instead?

> ... pulling the rug once the service reaches critical mass, doesn't mean it should be accepted and normalized.

Then don't sit on that rug.


You don't have to lecture me about the pitfalls of willingly relying on for-profit companies or the benefits of decentralization, but in the case of Docker we don't really have much of a choice unless you're suggesting that don't use it at all.

Images are published wherever the author decides that they're published and these changes are going to affect everyone who relies on an image that used to be hosted on Docker Hub.


We all rely on many free services and code. And, by the way, I'm a paying customer - I don't use their services but do this to support the pioneer!




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