Let me be more clear: devs are not required to release binaries at all. Bit they should, if they want their work to be widely used.

Yeah, but that's not there reality of the situation. Docker images is what drives wide adoption. Docker is also great development tool if one needs to test stuff quickly, so the Dockerfile is there from the very beginning and thus providing image is almost for free.

Binaries are more involved because suddenly you have multiple OSes, libc, musl,.. it's not always easy to build statically linked binary (and it's also often bad idea) So it's much less likely to happen. If you tried just running statically linked binary on NixOS, you probably know it's not as simple as chmod a+x.

I also fully agree with you that curl+pipe+bash random stuff should be banned as awful practice and that is much worse than containers in general. But posting instructions on forums and websites is not per se dangerous or a bad practice. Following them blindly is, but there is still people not wearing seatbelts in cars or helmets on bikes, so..

Exactly what I'm saying. People will do stupid stuff and containers have nothing to do with it.

Chmod 777 should be banned in any case, but that steams from containers usage (due to wrongly built images) more than anything else, so I guess you are biting your own cookie here.

Most of the time it's not necessary at all. People just have "allow everything, because I have no idea where the problem could be". Containers frequently run as root, so I'd say the chmod is not necessary.

In a world where containers are the only proposed solution, I believe something will be taken from us all.

I think you mean images not containers? I don't think anything will be taken, image is just easy to provide, if there is no binary provided, there would likely be no binary even without docker.

In fact IIRC this practice of providing binaries is relatively new trend. (Popularized by Go I think) Back in the days you got source code and perhaps Makefile. If you were lucky a debian/src directory with code to build your package. And there was no lack of freedom.

On one hand you complain about docker images making people dumb on another you complain about absence of pre-compiled binary instead of learning how to build stuff you run. A bit of a double standard.