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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

Do you know that keeping your users in a constant state of confusion is not the way to convince them that you're building a stable and secure product?

Also, isn't it kind of ironic that you built your company on OSS and then invited a well known destroyer of OSS onto your main stage?

Plus, I want my DockerCon money back. What exactly did you announce besides multi-stage builds at the general sessions that is actually benefiting Docker users? I don't care about your plumbing and constant rebranding, other than finding it very discouraging, I want to know what you're actually doing with your product this year. I guess nothing.

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> Do you know that keeping your users in a constant state of confusion is not the way to > convince them that you're building a stable and secure product

This.

I was a very early proponent of docker, and have been using it continuously since the very early versions. I read the release notes and most weeks I read the weekly email newsletter, and I still don't really have a clue where Docker is going, what its current status is (as far as how the various pieces fit together, etc) or what half the new features even do.

The docker team's communication is really poor, and their documentation seems even worse, unless I'm missing some oracle somewhere that fills in all the details that the actual documentation leaves out...

> what half the new features even do

if you don't currently use any of these new features, and can't work out what they do, perhaps you really don't need them. Therefore, ignoring it and continuing on is the best cause of action. It's not docker team's responsibility to educate you!

Well, sure, you can make that assertion, but when you have someone that is a) already pretty familiar with the technology, b) continuously keeping track of the product for years, and c) goes out of their way to try to educate themselves... and that person still feels kind of lost... sure, you could put all the blame on them, but that seems a bit disingenuous.

(Or you could make the assertion that I'm just an idiot, but my career suggests otherwise.)

Actually it is their responsibility to educate you. What do you think documentation does exactly?

Amen!

> Plus, I want my DockerCon money back. What exactly did you announce besides multi-stage builds at the general sessions that is actually benefiting Docker users? I don't care about your plumbing and constant rebranding, other than finding it very discouraging, I want to know what you're actually doing with your product this year. I guess nothing.

I was annoyed at the fact that I paid $150 extra for a workshop, "Docker for Publishers" that while useful in itself, I could have done in large part for free as a Hands On Lab: "You'll then deploy both a certified Docker image, as well as a certified Docker plugin."

Hey throwawaydc2017 sorry to hear that. I was one of the presenters, was there anything that you wanted to have covered that wasn't? If you have time could you email store-feedback@docker.com with more info?

> Also, isn't it kind of ironic that you built your company on OSS and then invited a well known destroyer of OSS onto your main stage?

I think I missed this; who are you referring to? I scrolled through the list and didn't recognize anyone that I would consider a "destroyer of OSS" so I'm not sure if I missed something, if you're just exaggerating or a little bit of both.

I'm not going to name names, if it's not obvious go watch the last general session keynote.

Edit: See my response below

Link?

Well, guess I'll do the detective work. Here's a link to the Docker blog that has the two keynotes:

https://blog.docker.com/2016/06/dockercon-general-session-vi...

Guest speakers for the last (second) general keynote were:

-Guest speaker #1: Docker and Microsoft demo by Mark Russinovich, CTO Microsoft Azure

-Guest speaker #2: Docker at ADP by Keith Fulton, CTO, ADP

And just somehow I sense that the parent poster isn't objecting to the CTO of ADP. /s

(What makes the objection doubly silly is that Mark Russinovich isn't the usual corporate drone one might expect. He's the guy who did the Sysinternals tools and several editions of the "Windows Internals" reference on the architecture of the Windows OS.)

> (What makes the objection doubly silly is that Mark Russinovich isn't the usual corporate drone one might expect. He's the guy who did the Sysinternals tools and several editions of the "Windows Internals" reference on the architecture of the Windows OS.)

From Sysinternals to the Azure CTO... what a weird transition. That guy has had an interesting career.

Yep, same reaction. Russinovich is not only amazing but also a good guy.

And most entertainingly those Sysinternals were open source originally and were immediately close sourced after he was hired during fierce negotiations by Microshaft and many angry at him for thumbing them publicly, especially for the NT SKU registry change debacle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals

(Interestingly citation needed; people still circulate the code on BitTorrent of very old copies.)

Ironically a MSer told me he was famous for his infamous condition he be a Senior Engineer with an unorthodox, exceptional contractual or understood conditions: no painful managing other MS people. This only changed when made the CTO of Azure.

No idea if that's rumor's true. He's a personal hero and I'm yet to read his novel about cyber war (yes, you heard me).

I am primarily talking about the Oracle/Docker partnership. Oracle is well known for acquiring open source projects and stripping them down to skeleton crews to remove competition, pushing the developers who built the OSS onto forks. Microsoft has improved its image, it's still got plenty of skeletons in its closet though. Remember the "Get the facts campaign"?

The fact that they’re constantly brought on stage to be paraded as a symbol of enterprise maturity and stability just tells me that the product is not mature or stable enough to speak for itself, and that the original OSS community really has no say in the direction of Docker while enterprises are sold the ship and wheel for their rubber stamp approvals.

Whoops, sorry about the incorrect conclusion. I didn't realize DockerCon 2017 was currently in progress.

I suspect he's upset that now Microsoft are being co-operative with open source the open source companies are reciprocating.

Incentive structures be damned, the evil M$ must be fought, here, I brought this knife to cut my nose off with! (+5, Insightful)

Are Linux-using companies still forced to pay patent royalties to Microsoft?

I think he's referring to Oracle.

I think he means Microsoft. There was a lot of emphasis on playing nice with windows in the conference. Good for developers all around. We were joking that it might be setting up the stage for an acquisition. I am personally hoping Docker follows the path of Redhat.

Playing nice with Windows has long been a priority. I saw the symptoms of this when I was following Docker GitHub ~2014-2015. In the area I cared about, Joyent compatibility, solid Linux/Unix approaches were significantly delayed or worse debated out of existance, because the concepts were incompatible with Windows. When you try to be all things, the result is something no one is satisfied with.

Oracle?

https://blog.docker.com/2017/04/oracle-database-dev-tools-in...

(The other posted list talking about Microsoft is from 2016)

Oracle is the OSS destroyer (see MySQL, Hudson, Java...)

OpenSolaris, OpenSSO, OpenOffice...

ZFS is the one that got away.

Illumos is a fork of the OpenSolaris code base. We still call the file system ZFS, and all the operating systems (including Illumos) that use ZFS are working together on the OpenZFS project.

To be fair, the open-source method wasn't exactly working out for Sun.

They joined the party a bit late, they are already a sinking ship.

Happily stopped using Docker when they began removing key features - even in the face of widespread user protest ,

https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/5001

Also their refusal to allow a feature to let a company change the default registry. Many enterprises need their own registry (and really want it to be the default) for a multitude of reasons... but they always just go "but we want everyone to have the same experience so we won't add this feature", even though there's been patches offered.

I recently went through a Docker Pluralsight course that made extensive use of this removed feature. I can scarcely imagine the politics behind this but it makes things much more confusing and the third party open source tool people recommend to replace it is difficult to use and doesn't provide the same information.

Part of the reason for removal (beyond just being difficult to maintain) is it is tied to the (now old) method of image storage where images were all just a tree of layers and any layer is considered an image even if you can't actually run that layer.

Today images are flat. You have a proper thing that is an image and and image is composed of layers. Some images may share layers (so they only need to be downloaded/stored once) but there is no hierarchy. You don't see layers anymore except by inspect an image (and even then only the content hash). There are quite some reasons for this to be the preferred method.

I thought LinuxKit and InfraKit were great announcements.

Me too, and I still think it is actually.

I agree with most of this; all the change has not instilled confidence in the product. I'd use a product with zero styling and a squiggled line for a logo if it meant it wouldn't pull me away from other things while failing after an update.

Well said. I don't recall the guy ever engaging in any answers that don't give him the opportunity to spout more marketing rubbish though.

If you're not paying Docker for Docker you're not a user they care about confusing. By building a large community and Google footprint for "Docker" you've served your purpose to the company. Now you can go and play in the corner with your Moby. Just don't call it "Docker" anymore because they own that trademark.

But they're certainly doing a lot with the product this year. It starts with cashing in the open source goodwill and rerouting the eyeballs to their enterprise offerings.

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