The main repos have plenty of non-rhel sw, and people can expend social capital working around IT policies, but that doesn't change it being against the grain.
We are fine because we use Ubuntu for the generally better GPU support, but I don't have control over the reality of others. I repeatedly get on calls with teams where this comes up, and I feel sorry for the individuals who are stuck paying the time etc. cost for this. Docker for RHEL 8 is literally installing Docker for Centos 7, so this isn't a technology thing, but political: A big corporate abusing their trusted neutral oss infra position to push non-neutral decisions in order to prop up another part of its business. This is all bizarre to operators who barely know Docker to beginwith, and care more about say keeping the energy grid running. ("The only authorized thing will likely not work b/c incompatibilities, and I have to spend 2w getting the old working thing approved?")
And again, none of this is technical. Docker is great but should keep improving, so competitive pressure and alternatives are clearly good... but anti-competitive stuff isn't.
But RHEL repositories are always out of date, sorry, I mean "stable". The disconnect is when you try to `yum install docker` on a RHEL system, you get an old version. If you want a newer version of Docker, you need to use the Docker provided repositories.
But this is the case for all software on RHEL. It's all older and more stable. Try installing any programming language, database, etc... it's always a version or two older in the official RHEL repositories. RedHat written stuff is always going to be more "current" because they control the repositories, but this isn't any different from how any other package is treated. RHEL has always been slow to update. (Which is why Docker created their own repositories in the first place).
It makes sense though... because RHEL has to check all packages that are part of their repository. Specifically because things in their repository are safe and stable. There is only so much time to go around testing updates to packages.
Oof I wish more enterprises/govs could do that. In RHEL 8, a team would need to modify their trust chain to include centos 7 / epel to get at the old and still working `yum install` binaries, and that gets into IT signoffs before we even get into discussing updated versions.
I'd totally expect a trade-off for old & stable over new and shiny for RHEL: They're getting paid for that kind of neutral & reliable infra behavior. That'd mean RHEL is packaging docker / docker-compose, and maybe podman as an optional alternative. Instead IBM/RHEL is burning IT dept $ and stability by not allowing docker and only sanctioning + actively promoting IT teams use their alternative in unreliable ways.
We are fine because we use Ubuntu for the generally better GPU support, but I don't have control over the reality of others. I repeatedly get on calls with teams where this comes up, and I feel sorry for the individuals who are stuck paying the time etc. cost for this. Docker for RHEL 8 is literally installing Docker for Centos 7, so this isn't a technology thing, but political: A big corporate abusing their trusted neutral oss infra position to push non-neutral decisions in order to prop up another part of its business. This is all bizarre to operators who barely know Docker to beginwith, and care more about say keeping the energy grid running. ("The only authorized thing will likely not work b/c incompatibilities, and I have to spend 2w getting the old working thing approved?")
And again, none of this is technical. Docker is great but should keep improving, so competitive pressure and alternatives are clearly good... but anti-competitive stuff isn't.