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Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea is to show how much container functionality is actually available out-of-the-box from the operating system. It raises questions about Docker's billion dollar valuation when someone can come along and reproduce a bunch of it with a short shell script. Next someone needs to take on orchestration and show how silly it was for IBM to pay $34 billion for OpenShift. :P

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> It raises questions about Docker's billion dollar valuation when someone can come along and reproduce a bunch of it with a short shell script.

You know the comment from a guy who thought Dropbox could be easily replaced with a few Unix tools? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

There's a difference between fulfilling a use-case well and having a technically minimal solution.

It’s all about creating a brand and selling it these days.

I actually wrote the core of an ansible class tool in 200 lines of Perl 20 years ago. Perhaps I should have been bought by red hat by now :)

I remember we used to write a kind of document database, using rcs and Perl, with versioning et al. This is to index all kinds of Text files of various formats. This was before JSON and XML got so big as data exchange formats.

Its almost like several of these projects existed for long until people came around took them a little more seriously and built businesses around them.

This also reminds me using the Unix DBM's do all kinds of key-value store work. Long before things like Redis and Memcached were around.

> It’s all about creating a brand and selling it these days.

Yes, and that's a big problem.

Nowadays huge numbers of developers pick choose technologies because they are hyped up (aka marketed) rather than being wary of them.

Yes a massive problem indeed. So many fashion victims in this industry!

meh - I mean, I don't know what language you write in today, but I would wager it's a language that has had at least a million spent in some kind of marketing, books, directly or indirectly or through advocacy (that also costs money as it's a company telling employees to put effort into that instead of other things). And if you include that, we're probably talking about $1M to 1/2 billion if it's in the top 10 tiobe index.

I use different languages, none of which is company-driven or had significant marketing campaigns, starting from Python.

Same for other projects (not programming languages).

The billion dollar figure, at the end of the day, is brand recognition. The actual cost for someone to re-implement all the code, if someone wanted to, is probably $10M? Even then, however it will be a fly-by-night never heard of again project like... rkt.

http://eliot-jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=rkt&allwords=true

http://eliot-jones.com:5690/Home/Trend?id=docker&allwords=tr...

I mean heck, here we are 137 comments into a thread about an alternative to docker and I was the first to mention rkt.

They do offer other things around Docker. Fairly sure those came along later, but they wouldn't be the first company to inflate the value at first and then add additional revenue streams to catch up.

Plus I think by providing infrastructure services and technology, they get valued much higher because other tech companies are their customer and they're usually rich as well

What about Evernote? It has a +$1b valuation, and 80% of its functionality could be recreated by a single programmer in a weekend.

80% of the functionality isn't where the value resides. It's the 20% of really well-thought-out niche features that make it valuable.

Perhaps not 'unicorn' valuable anymore as it went through that phase of adding enterprise shovel features. These days all cloud enterprise software companies must badly incorporate the features of other products because most Enterprise software buying criteria are just boxes to be ticked.

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