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Comment by nrclark | Hacker News Reader

Docker, Inc. is in a tricky position. They've raised a lot of capital, and continue to raise capital. According to Wikipedia, they took $105 million from Bain Capital in November of last year. So Docker, Inc has Mirantis on one side, and a whole bunch of VC on the other side.

I'm sure that Docker Hub is expensive to run, and the core Docker app isn't free to maintain either.

This TOS change was a fiasco, and absolutely didn't succeed in doing anything other than losing a lot of community goodwill. But I do understand why they're trying to squeeze some money out of Docker Hub. I'd be surprised if it's even break-even for them right now, and VC funds aren't exactly known for their acts of charity.

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I get what you are saying, but I gave little sympathy for their situation - they used the VC tactic of "give it away to gain and monopolise the market, then do the old switcheroo once we're #1", so they had to know what was coming.

Not really what happened — they planned to build a cloud platform on top of it and probably subsidize Docker Hub using those profits. But they got their lunch ate by Kubernetes.

Which is crappy, because while I use k8s, it's actually poorly written, half baked and kinda non-portable. The fact that it depends on ELB when you use it at Amazon (just to extract more money), is super sad.

Docker Swarm was a pure technology that didn't have such shitty half thought-out dependencies.

Personal thoughts and feelings about k8s aside, please don't conflate the requirements of EKS, Amazon's managed k8s offering of which they are fit to do what they do best and tightly knit their own products to come up with a solution, with k8s as a whole. You're perfectly welcome to deploy your own k8s with static IPs for ingress to nginx if you'd like on AWS, as you can anywhere.

I wonder how Docker survives after this, this action now rolled back was clearly a cost cutting exercise. Im still surprised Google hasnt acquired them.

Earnest question: what would Google stand to gain here?

Maybe: Push more Docker users toward Kubernetes -> Push the concept that Kubernetes apps are easiest to run via GKE -> Google Cloud profit?

Also: the default location of Docker images would become Google's registry -> drive more businesses to pay for Google's container registry. (It fulfills more business use cases than Docker's, so it should be easier to sell than Docker Hub.)

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