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Comment by ampdepolymerase | Hacker News Reader

A bigger issue is the fact that they were not able to become a unicorn despite having a tremendously popular product. It means there is no money in development tools innovation. This is not a good thing for the software community as it means all tooling innovation will only done and controlled by the FAANGs.

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I work for Red Hat but I'm a long time fan and user of Docker.

I don't think that's what this means at all honestly. Docker (the company) made some poor decisions that led to their troubles. I'm not here to crap on docker, but they quit investing in and moving their tool forward because they were focused on the EE offering. This opened the door for "competitors" to do the things docker wasn't doing (daemonless, rootless, cgroups v2, just a few). They also did things that scared people, like the whole "moby" rename thing. It made people worried that (fairly or not) Docker the company didn't have the best intentions for the open source version. They had poor direction on product. They would routinely refuse nice features that people wanted (many that included PRs) for things with terse, unkind "do not want" rejections, and then 6 months later they would end up adding it anyway. Some of these were suspected to be refused so as not to allow open source docker to compete with EE feature sets. docker-compose was the worst at this (To be fair I think it was mostly one very loud/very powerful person wrt docker-compose).

Docker started the race way ahead of everyone. To this day people still use the name "docker" to generically refer to containers.

Anyway, my point is not to crap on docker, just to say that in my opinion, in so many areas important to an open source leader, they made decisions that undermined their long term outlook.

for me it seemed:

- they stopped evolving the Dockerfile. Really this is the complexity killer that developers just "get".

(also they wouldn't have their entire API cloned if they were moving it forward)

- they subtly force everything through docker hub and conveniently forgot to do something like let people have a local repo. (redhat lets you define a local repo with --add-registry)

- telemetry. I went to install it on macos and it started collecting telemetry the moment I launched the installer.

Great points. I think they started requiring an email and sign up too for the Mac download, although if you had a deep link that would still work but if you didn't already have it you had to sign up.

There's no money in backends unless you have a great enterprise sales team.

SAS, Matlab, Oracle, Arc, there's lots of really boring backend systems with plenty of FOSS alternatives but you need sales.

If the customer is the developer, then they might ask their manager for a text editor with a nice UI. If the customer is the whole enterprise, then someone needs to wine and dine the CEO to get that $10,000 per core contract signed.

This is a really interesting point. I work in backend enterprise software (as a consumer more than a provider).

Surely the critical success component at scale is more than just "wining and dining". I truly wonder how Oracle has managed to do it for all these years...

There's also developer education (see mongo db), support, tooling, ecosystems ...

Because the FOSS generation feels entitled to be paid while refusing to pay for tools, which leaves the typical enterprise customers as the only place one can make money with development tooling.

That's not true. As a FOSS lover, I pay for a lot of tools. Both development related and unrelated. Moreover, some of the tools that I pay extend on FOSS software (Tower, Viscosity, Permute) and some of are FOSS already (Cyberduck).

The thing is, as a person I don't want to feel ripped off. I don't subscribe to JetBrains since my work doesn't require these tools (also, I use Eclipse for 15+ years and it works well). The subscription culture allows developer to pump features indefinitely but, I can't subscribe to all tools that I like.

There are many services that I subscribe too (Dropbox, Spotify, Netflix, IFTTT premium, Evernote, etc.) but, they give me a service which touches my life everyday. I have no budget to subscribe to a tool to test for a year. It's not feasible. I need to eat.

So yes, I'd rather have a good FOSS tool which doesn't want $100+ from me every year and I'd rather patch it myself. But, if you provide me a good service which I can't replicate easily, or don't want to manage myself, I'd pay you good money. I'd be also very happy if the tool I'm paying is FOSS.

Also the biggest obstacle driving me away from paying is the tools are closed source and I'd be locked in if the tool/company lets out the magic smoke. All the services I pay are not locking me in. I can get my data out of them. So it's not always wanting to earn money for free.

In my opinion, the Jetbrains tools are very affordable when compared with the huge productivity boost that they grant me.

I agree that intellij and eclipse are similar, but as soon as you work with C, C# or Python, there's very few good open source alternatives.

I have no doubt about their quality and affordability. Also, the price goes down when you subscribe for a longer time.

I write C/C++ and Python mainly. Eclipse CDT and PyDev are very good. Since I'm using the platform for 15+ years, I've seen its bad days too. Except some edge cases, CDT is bulletproof and works very well. PyDev is also very smart and helps me the way I need.

Actually, Eclipse has the best and most sensible Git UI I've ever used. I also like Tower but, Eclipse both makes sense and helps a lot in the relevant places.

Eclipse CDT is very good? I think we have a very different definition of very good. Could write a long rant on everything that was broken in Eclipse for C and C++ development.

One question on eclipse. Did eclipse finally sort out git/svn support?

Here's an interesting tidbit of history for those who don't know. One of the main drivers for the decline of eclipse was the complete lack of support for source control, which is a pretty basic feature for an IDE.

You could try to get some plugins. There were 2 major plugins for SVN and neither worked half the time for no particular reasons. It was a complete shitshow. Don't even think of doing that in a company where HTTP access must go through a proxy.

Developers eventually gave up and moved to JetBrains IDE. Source control worked out of the box.

Eclipse CDT was really bad back in the day. Slow, crashing, not smart enough but, it's very good now from my point of view. It can satisfy my needs and, I'm happy with it.

Heck, I've developed my whole Ph.D. with it and it interfaced the tools that I need to use well, was stable and fast. When I pressed a shortcut, it did the thing I expected it to do. The whole experience was, well, uneventful.

I've used Subversive IIRC during my Master's and it was uneventful too. Didn't lose any data, the plugin didn't misbehave or had any problem with it. Was using Assembla's SVN + Redmine bundle as my remote repository.

The git support was similar. I just installed it and it worked. Still works. As I said before, they've nailed the best logical view for git IMHO. IIRC, now it comes bundled with the Eclipse.

They may have done some things wrong in the past but, it's a solid IDE and I like working with it. I don't think they deserve the strong words you choose, but to each his own.

Of course, your mileage, taste and views may vary.

I wonder if a timed open source license would work? One in which code/features were automatically scheduled by the license to revert to GPL/BSD/whatever at a point a year or three in the future?

I think that might sap some of the impetus to reinvent those features in a competing open source project (they can of course just copy them if they wait), and also might entice people to pay that wouldn't normally because they don't want to get on the paid product train. Users also get a known date a feature will be available, a real date, not a projected delivery date.

In a lot of ways it's what many companies that develop products do already to allow people to get familiar with their product (have an open source version with less features), but this allows them a better story, makes users feel more sure about what's going on, and if they release the code immediately but it's unusable for a period by other projects, that does make it harder for those projects to cleanly reimplement unless they're sure they haven't seen in (that might be a net negative for the public with a litigation happy company).

The hard part would be tracking the time, but git has ways to make that pretty simple.

A number of databases uses the Business Source License (and its variants, usually including a non-compete clause). It acts as an option which vests (switches to a non-copyleft libre license) after n months. There is also the Polyform project but adoption has been low and their licenses are extremely controversial and unpopular.

I don't think that's a good read on the situation. I think a better analysis is that there is no money being what amounts to a facade on top of an operating system/kernel capability. All the real novelty and challenge to containers is in the OS itself. Everything else is more or less ease of use, which is important but relatively easy to replicate. In the span of 5 years or so, Docker went from being critical glue code to cruft.

That facade enabled millions to have easy access to that particular kernel feature. BSD jail's have been around for decades without mass adoption.

BSD jails weren't widely adopted because the BSDs themselves weren't widely adopted by the time the industry got to the point where something like Docker was increasingly seen as necessary. I remember being involved in one project that had to decide this exact question in the very early days of Docker - jails were much more stable back then, but customers wanted Linux containers, not "sufficiently Linux-like".

I think the GP's point is that alternatives can easily spring up when the main feature-set/value is in the kernel rather than the glue code.

It seems that HashiCorp does their business well, what makes it?

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