The Big Story

The container store

Docker is one of the most influential enterprise companies of the last decade with arguably the least to show for its role in making containers a mainstream software development technology. Yet its decision this week to introduce new pricing plans for its flagship product went over like the Ever Given's route through the Suez Canal in some developer circles.

Docker helped fundamentally change software development. Containers have been around for a long time, but around the middle of the last decade Docker's user-friendly method for adopting containers took software developers by storm, making it one of the fastest-adopted enterprise technologies ever and a unicorn startup. Docker Desktop is a popular software-development tool for Macs, PCs and Linux computers that provides one of the easiest ways to deploy applications in containers.

Yet Docker struggles to translate that success into revenue, and two years ago it pared down to focus on its developer community. This week, Docker announced plans to charge some developers a modest amount to use the product as part of a broader push toward subscription revenue.

• The new subscription plans cover a wide array of Docker products and resemble the pricing tiers on pretty much every enterprise SaaS company in the market, ranging from "Personal" to "Business" plans.
• There are a lot of features in those plans that some corporate developers were already paying Docker to use, but there's one big change: Starting immediately, Docker Desktop's free license only applies to what it is calling "small companies," or "fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue."
• It does not appear Docker will be calling for its corporate users to submit their company's income statements to its lawyers.
• But as of next January, those users outside the above parameters will technically be in breach of license unless they sign up for a subscription, which can cause problems at companies with strict compliance and procurement protocols.

And this latest attempt to make money has not gone down well in certain circles. We're not talking about a lot of money here: The most basic plan costs $5 per user per month for a solo "Pro" subscription, while the more enterprise-oriented "Business" plan costs $21 per user per month. That's less than most companies are probably paying for Microsoft Office, and if you're a big business, you're probably not going to pay the rack rate.

• Still, the move was met with some pushback among those who use Docker Desktop, and while in general Protocol | Enterprise does not recommend reading Hacker News threads, this one should provide the gist.
• Docker has been free for so long that it is ingrained across personal projects and massive pieces of internet infrastructure alike.
• And there are lots of corporate developers who work on open-source projects separate from their corporate duties on company time: Are they "Personal" users of Docker Desktop in those cases, or "Business" users?
• As HashiCorp's Mitchell Hashimoto put it, it's so much easier to charge more than you think something is worth upfront and reduce the price as needed than it is to get people to pay even a little for something that's been free for a long time. (Just ask anybody in the media business if you won't take his word for it.)

But Docker has a limited set of choices here. There's no question that it has borne the burden of its free users for a long time. Last year the company was forced to impose rate limits on the number of secure Docker images free users could pull from its repository amid the proliferation of continuous integration and delivery software.

• Given the options, it's hard to see what else Docker can do to support its business while providing an important service to enterprise software development: This move is not a growth hack.
• Countless enterprise tech companies, including Docker, have built strong followings around the superiority of their developer experience.
• "Any software that makes a developer more productive is probably worth paying for," said RedMonk's James Governor.

If Docker really wanted to extort money from enterprise tech, it could simply change the terms of the Docker and Moby open-source licenses it controls to make key parts of the code only available with a premium license.

• Uninterested in destroying its goodwill in the community, however, Docker is not doing that.
• And if it did, you'd better believe there would be a few Hacker News threads.

— Tom Krazit

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Irina Farooq, head of open data analytics, Google Cloud

What was your first tech job?

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Which enterprise tech legend motivates you the most?

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Around the Enterprise

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• Matt Asay will re-join MongoDB after several years at AWS, where he helped repair the cloud giant's image with the open-source community.
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