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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

So, what's the better business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker?

Really, there is none. After reading through so many of these types of threads, I'm convinced there is no sustainable business model for open source infrastructure.

The best bet would be to build proprietary paid services on top of the open source infrastructure. See Laravel's projects.

This seems at odds with the multiple open source kubernetes distributions on the market. The problem isn't that Docker is open source infrastructure, the issue was that it remained too low-level as a container daemon, didn't manage to build a large community around swarm, and then were really late to embrace kubernetes.

There easily could have been an alternate history where Docker Inc was the first one out of the gate with an enterprise kubernetes distribution, been a positive part of the community, and been a success.

Fully agree. I'm going to keep your post in mind when I write about the business model of darklang.

Hopefully it goes well, I heard about the downsizing and the OCaml to F# transition.

Thanks!

> I'm convinced there is no sustainable business model for open source infrastructure

From my personal point of view, the most sustainable way of funding development of free software is through businesses that utilize that software, but whose main business is not that software. The value proposition for the business to open source their software is mainly in getting improvements from outside, and to ensure better integration with other free software. But the main reason to build software should be selfish in the sense that you can directly use it yourself, and not the idea that you could somehow sell the software in some way or form.

Docker, Inc. has the opportunity to be the NPM, Inc. for container images. How much did NPM sell to GitHub for?

Less concretely, is there a business model for a low-level piece of infrastructure like Docker? Is there a business model for ncurses or readline or df or ls?

"Real world" infrastructure is typically high capex, low margin. How many VC-funded startups build bridges or tunnels? SpaceX is pivoting to Starlink to find good margins and escape the fate of being a trucking company to space.

I'd buy an lscon t-shirt!

The business model for infra software is to get (aqui)hired by a company with a service business model.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with their margins - their costs are way below anyone else’s. I think the rationale behind Starlink is to soak up their excess capacity while the market demand for space access grows in response to their increasingly low prices.

But I agree that in general, “real world” infrastructure is low margin, I think that’s because it’s completely undifferentiated and has become a commodity

How much did NPM sell to GitHub for?

Was this number released?

There is an interesting talk [0] by Philipp Krenn (Elastic) on “Open Source as a Business. Strategy, struggle, success”. This talk takes the perspective of Elastic, the company behind the open source products Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, which makes its money with support, the commercial extensions, and cloud offerings. But we are also taking a look at how others are approaching this challenge, what worked, and what failed.

[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2019-2463-open_source_as_a_bus...

It depends on what that infrastructure is. Docker owes its existence to the OS not providing an adequate interface to create lighter containers than 00's style virtual machines. They chose to be imported and used as part of the stack by kubernetes instead of offering a better solution, which was clearly where kubernetes was headed. This one is less of a model question, than a market position question.

Elastic, on the other hand, is a very specialized application and the main issue they've had is having to compete with cloud providers (MongoDB also shares this problem). It's a very different problem, and both companies (Elastic and Mongo) seem to be finding ways to compete and cooperate. Elastic on Amazon is a great gateway drug to Elasticco's offerings.

>Elastic on Amazon is a great gateway drug to Elasticco's offerings.

Why is that? Is amazon not able to run it properly?

AWS is several versions behind, and only supports a limited number of plug-ins and does not allow custom plug-ins.

Can’t speak for the poster who wrote the parent post, but we’ve just evicted the AWS Elasticsearch stack from our platform. For something simple, it was a resource hog, configured badly out of the box, complex in all the wrong places, and limited in its offering and linkages to other AWS resources. Just my 2 cents of course.

Dev-tooling. I would have expected them to come up with something like https://www.testcontainers.org/ and sell enterprise/community licenses, just like they do with their cross platform clients. Enterprises need support, and by creating a rich suite of products that become essential to developers, they could have maybe really stuck (hard to predict what could happen).

Instead they tried really hard to make docker swarm a thing while kubernetes started taking off. To be sure, at the time, it wasn't clear which platform would succeed, and I remember that a certain OpenStack project tried to support both (like all OpenStack projects that try to be everything to everyone). Kubernetes has a lot of concepts that need to be learned, so the barrier to entry was much higher, and docker swarm seemed more straightforward.

All devs loved docker right away but in the early days I remember there being a lot of blogs about NOT running containers in production because of all the security issues. Kubernetes made that problem go away. It got adoption by different cloud providers which made it easy to deploy/use on their platform. That was maybe a tell: if devs loved docker so much and kubernetes was the tool that cloud providers supported, they could have focused on the former.

My own opinion: I think there is as a marketplace. Years ago when I started browserless.io, I wanted to find a way to sell access to the core image of ours. Docker kinda has/had a marketplace, where you can buy access to curated and secure images, but it didn’t get any support or news on it. Because of this we went the open-code route and just sold licenses. Too bad because I’d much rather have had a marketplace to do this instead.

Open code or core?

OpenFaaS has been a struggle even since it was started, even with a large community and many commercial end-users, none pay for support, services or sponsor.

Most of the time saying that Open Source isn't sustainable results in some smarty dropping Elastic or some other massive VC-backed company in like GitLab. It's not helpful.

I suppose it's open core. Open Source is hard because you have to separate people from their money even though the code is "free." I'm not saying it's _the_ answer, but browserless.io isn't VC backed, and it certainly makes more money than most of the Patreon/sponsor models. I understand that it's not just a library, but a full-blown service, which makes it easier to market and sell.

Have you considered a hosted product? I have no idea what your audience is like, but that seems to be where we've had a lot of success. Happy to chat anytime as well: joel at browserless dot io.

Well Docker used to be dotCloud, a PaaS company around the time of Heroku, but that didn't take off. So they pivoted to Docker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker,_Inc.

Heroku had a lot of revenue and was acquired by Salesforce. I just learned on Twitter that YC was in the red before the Heroku acquistion !

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1334945195532685317

I think what Heroku did right is really nail the Rails experience, and the Rails customer base. And then they expanded to multiple languages with the "Cedar" stack.

dotCloud tried to do every language from the get-go, and had a subpar experience for all of them, from what I understand.

The python/django experience on dotCloud was really rather nice, actually. Perhaps much of that sympathy was coming from people were comparing Rails/Heroku with Rails/dotCloud, where Heroku has a rather big head start, but Django/dotCloud was the first easy, pipelineable deployment experience I had ever found despite having already tried all the early competition.

It probably wouldn't have taken long for a Python-centric competitor to leapfrog them, but by the time they had, dotCloud was basically all in on the Docker experience, which was transformative.

Private repo host...because whatever they charge, it is cheaper than using an FTE to maintain it internally unless you want a flaky internal SLA.

I use it as a private repo host. The cost is a no-brainer. We'd probably pay 2x or 3x more compared to the value we're getting. The independence from the Cloud services (ECR, ACR, GCR) makes it a better option. Also, for now, there isnt any funny-math on multi-factor egress costs -- which become tricky to compute in real life.

We use it for containers to be run on k8s. As long as there are not super-low latency requirements for startup, I'd prefer an independent single private repo over multiple in-zone repos.

Acquisition by one of the tech giants.

Sell their Goodwill.

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