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> I have zero empathy for these companies and their investors.

Wow, imagine being so hateful towards amazing open-source tools

being open-source is not a magical shield against criticism

Open source tools were developed by the community and they're being harrassed now for monetization.

How is that being hateful? I am looking out for the community in this sense.

They are not developed by a 'community'. The developers who build it are paid for by investors. Those investors want a huge return. It's not open source, it's bait and wait

Exactly, when you take a look at the mainstream "open-source" projects, you 'll see that those projects are all developed and maintained by some people who gets paid to do that. (e.g. Kubernetes, Firecracker, Gvisor, Bottlerocket, Podman)

Bait and wait and ... But what's step 3? Doesn't seem to work super well, hmm

MySQL was acquired for 1B. Elastic is currently worth 10B. Redhat was acquired for 34B.

What's not working well?

Good points. So step 3 can be to do an exit, when the software is really popular.

I wonder what's next for Elastic. And mongodb etc. And all their users and customers

When open-source companies develop the majority of their product, haters will complain that they’re “not open enough”.

When open-source companies invite more contributions from their community, haters will complain that they’re “harassing the community for monetization”.

Simply put, some people will never be happy no matter what Docker does, and clearly you are one of them.

There's a silent majority size x100? that is happy with both approaches :-) look at Actix-web for example (when the founder quit), the happy but silent people were like 500x more than the a bit angry ones

> when Amazon swiped the rug from under them. Good.

> I have zero empathy for these companies and their investors.

Are you trolling? Or do you want to see all amazing open source tech move behind closed doors and payed walled gardens?

You're presenting a false dichotomy. I think the parent would have preferred these projects be successful and sustainable without the sleazy tactic of baiting users with free stuff, taking a mountain of VC cash, and then desperately trying to find ways of "monetizing" those users. Bleh.

F/OSS software works best when it's not a revenue source of the business that develops it. "Hey, I ran into $problem at $work and created $project to fix it! I'm giving it away so that it might solve your problem too! Hit me up on $mailing_list if you want to contribute." Red Hat is pretty much the poster child of this model. They make $0 on all the FOSS software they develop and release to the world but they dogfood it into their own products to collect dividends.

> 5. Company has trouble monetizing the users. Users are pissed.

Are we pissed?

Docker hasn't started showing me ads or spewing MOTDs asking for donations.

I haven't run into limitations that would have me purchase an upgrade.

It hasn't been bought by a proprietary company that would make me start worrying about its licencing.

It's a solid workhorse that's been at all my previous jobs and will be at all my future jobs for the foreseeable future.

Most criticisms of it boil down to "there are other container technologies".

Elastic has a market cap of over $10billion. It is literally one of the most successful tech companies ever.

> absolutely ground breaking, unlike anything else

Containers existed for decades as a concept and for years on Linux (using lxc or VirtSquare and later nspawn)

It is true that the technologies existed for a while. I played with (Free)BSD jails and Solaris Zones long before Docker. Docker however made things "trivial" with the integration from container building, to public registry and docker-compose, which can make developer lives (depending on domain) much nicer. With jails and zones it was never as convenient.

That was docker's real value add, making it easy and developer centric. Previous containerization technologies were heavily ops-centric. I come from an ops background and I remember thinking at the time that Docker was in some ways a developer workaround to barriers that ops set up to limit what they could do and protect them from themselves.

Except Docker had already raised $10M before launching. So they do not match your pattern.

Doesn't matter. $10M initial round to offer free product to get users aboard.

The key point is to get users addicted to free.

Uber did this by undercutting the entire taxi industry at a loss. Ever wondered why your rides were so cheap!? Jio did the same in India, offer free unlimited internet on their phone service and wipe out the competition.

Who cares? Why not just milk their VCs for the free handouts and then move on like we do with every other VC funded unsustainable service.

Their initial product was a platform-as-a-service (dotCloud), which wasn't free, aside from the early beta. Docker was essentially a pivot. I see no evidence that the company was founded as a nefarious scheme to get users addicted to a free product.

You just made my point. The reason why I’ve never heard of dotCloud and literally everyone knows Docker.

Docker is popular because it’s free. A lot of people would be upset if they take down their free hosting repositories.

As a user, I want to pay for stuff to sustain companies. They can still be open source.

If enough users had wanted to pay for dotCloud, they wouldn't have needed to pivot in the first place.

My understanding (as a complete outsider) is that they raised a $10+ million series A for their PaaS. The PaaS then presumably wasn't successful enough to raise a subsequent round, but one of their technologies (Docker) was, despite the monetization path for it not being clear yet. So they pivoted to focus on that.

I'm not sure what other outcome could plausibly happen in this scenario. If they stuck with the PaaS as their main focus, they would have gone out of business many years ago.