Right, $5/$9/$24 is nothing compared to a developer salary. So if developers switch to Podman, fixing the occasional glitch is going to be more expensive than a Docker subscription. E.g. a while ago there was a bug (caused by a qemu update) that didn't allow Podman to run when the VM used >=4GiB memory [1]. I can imagine that such an issue would result in a large amount of wasted time for triaging and working around this issue.
Not meant negatively towards Podman, maintaining such a package in a constantly moving ecosystem is hard. The point is more that you pay Docker to do the extensive testing for you, so that the work-stopping issues are ironed out before they roll out to customers.
> Right, $5/$9/$24 is nothing compared to a developer salary.
And yet there are horror stories of finance not approving purchases that would significantly improve productivity.
While obviously greater than the $5/9/24 you bring up, I've heard of companies not wanting to buy a second monitor for their engineers, whereas I'd wager the productivity gain would pay for itself in only a couple months.
Not meant negatively towards Podman, maintaining such a package in a constantly moving ecosystem is hard. The point is more that you pay Docker to do the extensive testing for you, so that the work-stopping issues are ironed out before they roll out to customers.
[1] https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/14303