This article seems to be arguing that Docker’s primary downfall was being hostile to its open source community. Without having an opinion on whether that’s true, I suspect the core issue was not that but their business model and execution.

Before Kubernetes was the dominant container tech, they were pushing Swarm but I remember being confused about where Docker “standalone” stopped and where Swarm began. Perhaps it would have been better as a separate tool with a more clear open core model?

Then there was Docker Hub, whose UI was never great and which always seemed light on features.

I don’t recall seeing any kind of container introspection tool from them for a while either, despite others coming out.

Meanwhile, they represented a threat to the cloud providers if you could truly run anything in a container on any cloud. But the cloud providers all neutralized that threat by the classic “commoditizing the complement” strategy where the Docker cluster and registry tech were all either open source or commoditized.

Once Kubernetes emerged as the winner and de-valued Swarm while the cloud providers all offered their own Kubernetes and Docker registry offerings, I’m not sure how much more profit there was for Docker to claim.

Honestly, startups are hard. Sometimes really hard. It’s hard to know if a different team would have gotten different results in this space.