There is not just cost to count. There is also value in having a custom solution that is well integrated into your other tools, and value in avoiding vendor lock-in. Large companies build a lot of their own internal tooling for those reasons.
Let's say there was no open source replacement (that's not true, or at least it's not going to be true when Podman and Rancher improve, but for the sake of argument...)
What would prevent Docker from doubling the subscription right now? Tripling it?
If you do the same math for a company with thousands, or tens of thousands, of developers, the answer looks different.
Large companies already have dedicated teams for stuff that is a lot less critical than the container runtime.
The companies that are too big to avoid paying, but too small to build a replacement, are the ones that are in a jam -- for now. But in a year or two, Podman or Rancher might might fully meet their needs. What should they do then? Continue to pay for Docker, or use a free and open source alternative that has feature parity?
That is changing fast and in a year or two Podman and Rancher (and a few others) will be just as good. A number of large companies are also building their own in-house replacements.
I was personally looking for an alternative even before the license change, because the performance of Docker Desktop on my Macbook Pro is terrible in a number of different ways.
> The OSS community almost seems to require OSS maintainers to be in poverty, while allowing large corporations to freely consume all of their work. That just isn't sustainable.
First of all, it's been sustainable for a long time -- what changed?
Secondly, a lot of major open source projects are being worked on by developers who are employed full-time by large corporations to do it. And I don't just mean Red Hat or the Linux kernel. Those devs get paid by their employers to work on open source projects that benefit their employers and also the wider community -- it seems like a really successful, scalable, sustainable model.
The people who are having a hard time are the indie devs, but let's be honest, being an indie dev who gives away software for free has always been, and always will be, a bad business model. It's not a good idea to do that for a living. It never will be.
> My personal experience with devs who don't want to GPL their code or contribute to GPL projects is that they're under the impression that having a permissive license on their own project will get $corp to use it and, somehow, they'll profit from $corp using it.
A lot of big corporations will not allow GPL dependencies to be used in their codebases, and not having a GPL license will definitely make software more usable by those corporations.
How the developer expects to profit by giving something away for free is definitely a mystery, but there is also some truth to the idea that a GPL license does scare companies away.
If you give something away for free, you should not expect money for it. If you license it for anyone to use, you should not be surprised if some of the users end up being big companies. By choosing to give it away, you have chosen to give up control of what happens.
If you want to sell software for money, then do that. If you want control over how it is used, choose a license that gives you that control. But don't just give things away for free and then complain about what users do with the freedom you willingly gave to them.
> Google is failing to identify and extract more valuable labor from OP.
Google is doing a pretty good job extracting labor value in general. If they miss a specific individual who doesn't seem very motivated (to the extent of being a self-described slacker), I wouldn't view that as a failing. Ambitious people generally make themselves noticed, and trying to extract ambition from every slacker in the company is probably not very rewarding.
> The failing for google is not providing this person a path to do more or at least understanding their ambition to do more.
That's not a failure of Google. People need to be self-driven.
People who want to do more should talk to their manager about it, or pursue other opportunities within the company, or leave. Google and all the other big tech companies offer plenty of things to do for ambitious people if they express an interest.
Based on my experience in academia, I don't think there will be a significant boon to public culture because of this. Most academics are very specialized within their fields and are not used to having to explain, or justify, the fundamental theories of their fields to the general public. They work within a community in which everyone already accepts those things as the default position, and they assume that their audience has a deep background in the field.
In other words, most academics spend their careers preaching to the choir, and making little tweaks to their field in very specialized areas within an established framework -- what Kuhn refers to as "normal science." Successful engagement as a public intellectual requires a different set of practices.
It's also a real pain to call Scala code from Java, which makes blending Java and Scala code in a project, or adding Scala code to an existing Java project, much less attractive.
Let's say there was no open source replacement (that's not true, or at least it's not going to be true when Podman and Rancher improve, but for the sake of argument...)
What would prevent Docker from doubling the subscription right now? Tripling it?