Well, it's how they established themselves in the market. Without being friendly to open source projects they wouldn't have had that marketing and wouldn't exist as a company.

So now they destroy their foundations and learn whether they 10x or fold. Pretty standard VC playbook so I assume that's the driving force here.

> the article says its open source definition is "too strict" because it says you must have "no pathway to commercialization"

What a load of crap. Free Software's "0th freedom" is the ability to use the program for whatever purpose you wish. The definition of Open Source is even looser than that. They are asking their "Open Source" users to make their software non-free, by restricting its use cases.

Anyway, the writing has been on the wall for a long while. If you haven't moved off Docker Hub yet, now is the time.

No, they are refusing to provide free artefact hosting to startups.

Gitlab's Open Source program has similar restrictions, and it's just kind of weird. Like, there are multiple companies actually making money off of Xen; but because Xen is owned by a non-profit foundation (with a six-digit yearly budget), and the foundation isn't trying to profit, it still qualifies. (As does, for instance, the GNOME project.)

OTOH, somewhere else in this context it was mentioned that curl is almost entirely maintained by one guy who makes money from consulting; and because of that, he wouldn't qualify.

So if you're either small enough to be a side hobby project, or large enough to have your own non-profit, you can get it for free; anywhere in between and you have to pay.

Personally I'd be happy for Xen to pay for Gitlab Ultimate, except that the price model doesn't really match an open-source project: we can't tell exactly how many people are going to show up and contribute, so how can we pay per-user?

While I have no _expectations_ of free hosting, one example of a project that will be affected is mine – https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/outlinewiki/outline

I have been building this for 5+ years, and offer a community edition for free while the hosted version is paid. Once the community edition starts costing money there will be even less reason to continue supporting it, it already causes a lot of extra work and problems that I'm otherwise uncompensated for.

> Once the community edition starts costing money there will be even less reason to continue supporting it

This is exactly the reasoning Docker is using, so it seems reasonable?

If you're going to call it "open source" that should mean what "open source" usually means, i.e. that e.g. RedHat is eligible.

Somewhat related : what is Docker's stance on the licenses that fail the first Open Souce test, those that forbid commercial use (NC) ?