Comment by kinghuang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kinghuang | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like all that VC money was actually their undoing. Instead of working with the community, Docker spent bucketloads of money acquiring a lot of community projects and startups in an obvious attempt to become an end-to-end container solution company. But, they didn't have a plan and ended up killing most of those acquisitions. To me, it felt like Docker was using all the money they got to squash the community instead of working with it.

Every year at DockerCon, there would be flashy announcements that went nowhere. As a developer, those years from 2013 to 2017 were both super exciting and super frustrating. Everything started falling apart when Docker (the project) got split into Moby for open source and the rest went commercial. Docker started to sell Docker Swarm (the original), only to kill it a year later with a new Docker Swarm (what we have today). Then, Kubernetes started growing traction, leapfrogging both Docker Swarms, Mesos, and others in adoption. They never had a cohesive commercial plan. Just lots of empty promises and burned bridges.

When I think of Docker (the company), I feel bitter about all the projects they killed in their attempt to own the market. I love using Docker (the software), but the company's just one big disappointment.

>I feel like all that VC money was actually their undoing.

I don't think you have Docker without VC money. I think at best you have some LXC-lite project that is intertwined with GCP/AWS/Azure but unfortunately, I don't think you get something as quite polished as Docker in the same timeframe without VCs pouring millions to hire people to work on it.

Where I am sympathetic to Docker is Docker wouldn't have worked as your standard Open Source project; it took a ton of paid engineering hours (and you can argue X% was wasted on projects that went nowhere, but that's a given in any org), to get the software and infrastructure right, and if they had tried to charge developers they would have gotten nowhere. Even now, where people are keenly aware of the value of Docker, trying to monetize it is met with tears and angry blog posts.

I think Swarm was the plan (as the money has always been in providing infrastructure), Google just had more developer sway (which also killed Mesos).

The way I see it are there probably a ton of services you could build with the right team and right amount of people that could make an even greater impact than Docker on productivity and they would never be built because it would be way too difficult to monetize and the people with the talent to build it are going to get paid more working at FAANG to do any sort of OSS approach.

>there probably a ton of services you could build with the right team and right amount of people that could make an even greater impact than Docker on productivity and they would never be built because it would be way too difficult to monetize

There's a big difference between creating value and capturing value. Probably thr biggest single issue with capitalism in general.

In all fairness, Docker never worked with the community at all. At times it looked like they almost got their own community going, but it was never a priority to them.

They were always in a race to reinvent everything the Docker way. Which is, sort of, what you need to do if you want to become an enterprise software company, if that's where you think the money is. It's pretty much exactly in the footsteps of VMware. But to make that work, they would have had to work much closer to Windows, which probably was even harder than the Linux community.

Docker couldn't have existed without VC money. Free hosting was what made them hugely popular. Docker was a VC productization of containers.

Moby doesn't seem excellent either. at least the tickets I've stumbled into the stewards have not been very receptive

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