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Comment by dvanduzer | Hacker News Reader

If Docker's future is an acquisition, who will it be? I have not thought deeply about this, but like the author, I have also heard scuttlebutt.

From the "good for us" perspective, the community would not miss the company's leadership on Linux Container standardization nearly as much as the aggregation service that is DockerHub. But from the "good for the acquiring company" perspective, who would care? A GitHub or a RedHat has the mission and user base where it might make sense, but both companies already have plenty of their own infrastructure tooling. I'm also not sure either company would bid very hard against an Oracle or Google.

The most strategic acquirer sounds to my ear like Microsoft. Their recent Linux compatibility investments prove they might actually Extend instead of Extinguish. We've gotten some time to get used to Microsoft not being The Enemy anymore. Heck, you could even say I'd be a little enthusiastic if this news dropped.

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I'm not sure how you put GitHub in the mix to acquire Docker, they are not a very big company in terms of revenue (currently they talk about a $200m run rate, which is pitiful even compared to RedHat).

But I agree Microsoft is the most likely buyer. They are probably just waiting for the bottom to fall out for Docker and they can snap it up for the right price.

An earlier draft of that comment had "not sure either company would bid very hard" phrased as "not sure either company has the financials to support" so I looked up RHT's market cap, saw it was in the 10s of billions, remembered GitHub is still privately held, and decided to stop the detailed research at that point.

Good catch, though. GitHub is a candidate because their core business model, like Most Linux Distributors, is built around aggregating and re-distributing open source software in a trustworthy fashion. (And support contracts around that.)

No acquisition is also a possibility. Neither Docker the tech nor Docker the company is too big to fail right now.

> No acquisition is also a possibility.

Oh my yes, the quiet release of CRI-O by RedHat and Google recently was a pivotal moment. You can run a container orchestration environment in production without anything from Docker the company. You still need it to build and maybe host images but the rest is pluggable.

Have you tried bazel.build by chance?

It's been my impression that they're angling for either a VMWare or Microsoft acquisition. They both like buying things that live at the edge of enterprise-y and trendy.

I know what you meant, but I think it's helpful to talk about "trendy" in the context that matters: something popular that will either widen the competitive moat for existing customers, or bring in new customers that are soon to graduate into wanting enterprise support from a VMWare or a Microsoft.

VMWare is an interesting possibility! Docker seems like it would cannibalize too much of their existing product line, but VMWare's existing products are already kind of self-cannibalizing. (This is why many engineers find the enterprise market so confusing. Nobody differentiates products well, because past a certain size, networks of human relationships [sales, support, etc.] matter more than branding.)

But from that "good for us" perspective, VMWare looks as bad as Oracle these days. I would still "vote" for Microsoft.

Docker would fit nicely Microsoft’s Azure container offensive and new found love for all things Linux. They tried Mesosphere, but that didn’t work out.

Can you elaborate about what has been tried and what hasn't worked out?

Microsoft made an offer for Mesosphere, but they turned it down [0]. These deals are of course never that "snappy". They probably had long and hard negotiations, but the deal never happened.

0: http://www.businessinsider.com/florian-leibert-mesosphere-ce...

Agree that Microsoft would be a plausible buyer. They have deep pockets, have hired ex-Docker engineers such as Jess Frazelle on the Azure team, and are investing heavily in the capability to run Linux-based Docker containers seamlessly on Windows. However, they still need to persuade people to use their stack. Aquiring Docker-the-company is the sort of thing Microsoft would do to buy their way into the market.

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