Docker Acquires Mutagen | Hacker News Reader

Docker Acquires Mutagen

docker.com

89 pointsgtirloni60 comments

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Ahh cool, I look forward to Docker, Inc. destroying yet another company.

Yes. I'm still bitter about Tutum. Absolutely loved Tutum.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/21/docker-acquires-unikernel-...

2. https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/21/docker-acquires-cloud-star...

3. https://thenewstack.io/docker-acquires-sdn-technology-startu...

4. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150312005148/en/Doc...

I really miss Tutum :'(

I have no idea what Tutum is (was?), but why don’t you guys build it “again”. If you miss it, there’s a clear need. Go for it.

You seem to be laboring under the false impression that people can replicate a system perfectly just by having used it once upon a time.

I would imagine for myriad financial, personal and most of all technological reasons (of which you would not know, as by your own admissions, “you have no idea” what it was).

Did Tumtum agree to be purchased, or are you suggesting this was some kind of hostile takeover?

Note for the confused (maybe just me?), this is not related to python-mutagen[0], the metadata library.

[0] https://mutagen.readthedocs.io

I'm the creator of Mutagen, happy to answer any questions that I can about the project, acquisition, or anything else!

What's your salary?

Well, that's one of those things I won't answer, but Docker is actually really great about listing nominal salary ranges for their positions on their Docker Careers page [1] - I'd encourage anyone to check out the openings there!

[1] https://www.docker.com/career-openings/

Do you believe given Docker’s history of poor strategy (e.g., monetizing late requiring changes that negatively impact reputation such as docker desktop and hub), communication (e.g., the short notice changes a couple of months ago around free groups resulting in backlash) and in some cases destruction of successful businesses (see other comments in this thread) that this will result in a positive result for end users?

I hope you made bank while the ship continues to sink.

Mutagen's core users are primarily Docker users, and I honestly think they'll be much better served by the tighter integrations that we'll be able to offer now. If I didn't think that were the case, and I didn't think there were a net win (for Docker, Mutagen, and their users), then I wouldn't have joined.

Fair, I appreciate the answer. I guess I’ve just seen enough purchases where it’s just for the payday that I’m a bit cynical. Thanks again for taking the time to read and answer, wishing you the best

Thanks! I totally get it — I think a lot of time with acquisitions in general there's also a lot of good faith intentions that never manifest for whatever practical reason(s), so I can totally understand why the cynicism arises. I appreciate the positive wishes and I will do my best to convert those into positive outcomes!

> there's also a lot of good faith intentions that never manifest for whatever practical reason(s)

This is the risk blindness that exists in people that find success.

No one will perceive risk correctly. They will either over or under estimate. Those there's a huge amount of survivorship bias and those who underestimate risk and get lucky will be those who experience the most outsized success.

This isn't to say the cynical "I told you so"s are right, they're blind to the benefits. It's just that it's easy to say you can see the win-win. From the outside it's easy to see that the underlying benefit for Docker is reducing the power and input of other sources of influence in their technology, and that's a greater benefit to them than any benefit that this move could possibly provide to the users. But if anyone could make it work it's you.

Are you happy with the outcome?

I'm really happy with this outcome! I've been a Docker Captain for almost 3 years now, so being an employee at Docker was a very easy switch to flip (at least mentally). As I said in another comment, this really felt like the logical step given that almost all of Mutagen's users are Docker users, and I think this is the best possible outcome for the project too!

You started an open source business making and publishing free software. How do you feel about going to work for a proprietary software vendor that ships lots of closed source software under restrictive licenses?

Was it a change in your own views toward user freedom (and an abandonment of free software ideology) or a practical matter?

I'd point out that most of the foundational components of Docker's technology stack are FOSS (e.g. [0] [1]). Mutagen also has (and had, prior to acquisition) closed-source components and components licensed under non-OSI licenses (e.g. SSPL), so evaluate my response in that context (and also please note that these are my responses, and not representative of Docker's opinions/positions). Also, as mentioned in the acquisition FAQ [2], we don't have any plans to change the open-source licensing structure, and we're still open to contributions.

It's a delicate balance to strike, and almost more delicate to discuss. At the end of the day, an open source business is still a business, and you have to make money to eat, shelter, and continue writing code. I can certainly appreciate that there are different approaches to balancing that with open-source (e.g. consulting rather than close-sourcing), but so long as you're setting natural (non-contrived) boundaries between open-source and proprietary, then I don't think you're doing anything wrong. In fact, several companies were embedding and making money from Mutagen before I was, but that never really bothered me — that was the freedom I was affording them as users.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for user freedom and I've always strived to offer that with Mutagen (e.g. allowing people to disable components that might not fit the OSI definition of FOSS). I also have nothing but the utmost respect for the authors of open-source software; Mutagen stands on the shoulders of many different dependencies and I've always strived to ensure that we're acknowledging those in a manner that is compliant with their licensing requirements (or going above and beyond that).

In the end, it's a tough but fair question. I don't think my views have changed and I don't think there's any real incompatibility. It's a balance I'll necessarily continue to assess on a daily basis, both at Docker and in any other FOSS I write.

[0] https://github.com/docker

[1] https://github.com/moby

[2] https://www.docker.com/blog/mutagen-acquisition/#mutagen-faq

> Also, as mentioned in the acquisition FAQ [2], we don't have any plans to change the open-source licensing structure, and we're still open to contributions.

Well, assuming you require contributors to sign a CLA, that is requiring anyone who donates software to your organization to allow you to release it in nonfree products (something Docker requires today, given that they ship proprietary software).

I'm personally really tired of this sort of free software cosplay, where companies pretend to respect user freedoms but are actually just pretending to embrace free software ideology with a license here or there but don't actually support user freedoms (as evidenced by their continued use of nonfree licenses and CLAs to enable dual licensing).

> but so long as you're setting natural (non-contrived) boundaries between open-source and proprietary, then I don't think you're doing anything wrong

I do. You can't be said to respect user freedoms if you, you know, don't respect user freedoms on a regular basis by promoting proprietary software that users can't easily modify and redistribute freely. That's actively user-hostile, just like Docker Inc has been with Docker Desktop and other products.

Oh, so that's why it has an extension for Docker Desktop.

Mutagen has become a core part of many of my workflows. The UX can be a little rough, but reliability and speed amazing.

Maybe they'll improve it a bit, maybe they'll mess it up, whatever, the current version is very good!

Think I'll stick with Orb Stack still though.

OrbStack is shockingly good. We have tools that are deeply integrated with Docker Desktop and the CLI and it all worked perfectly out of the box when I switched to OrbStack. It also takes like seconds to start and has yet to overheat my laptop or drain my battery.

Highly recommended: https://orbstack.dev/

TIL Docker Desktop is a battery drain / resource hog. I’ll give this a try.

Orb Stack looks neat but I don't think it provides that capabilities that Mutagen does? It seems like the two would be compatible with one another.

+1 for Orbstack, shockingly good.

Why do we need GUIs? I find Docker CLI shockingly easy to use.

I use the CLI as well, but on MacOS, you need more plumbing like a Linux VM. OrbStack (and Docker Desktop) provide this plumbing in a single app package, so the CLI can actually work, whether you prefer a GUI or a CLI. (Or docker-compose, as I use most often.)

Congrats Jacob! Mutagen always really impressed me, and is some of the most beautiful code I’ve ever read. Well done!

Ideally this gets bundled in to standard mac docker so it's just default behaviour. I've spent way too many hours trying to get this - and various other "speed up docker on mac" - configurations set up properly. Could never do it. Guess I'm just dumb, but I just want to press a button or two. I'm not a docker expert - I often don't use it by choice, but have to use it in some client/project situations. It was simply too cumbersome to install/configure last time I tried (2021 and mid 2022).

I guess Docker's fuse fs on native is still too slow. I remember one of the options was filesyncing in some way, such as with rsync triggered by inotify.

Why are acquisitions legal? Is there ever a serious argument for how a company acquiring another company is net beneficial to users/customers?

Because people want an avenue to exit for the time they've spent building.

I agree with you, but I think the main argument is that it lets companies provide better products and potentially cheaper prices from vertical integration. Sometimes acquisitions are only done for the human resources, and the customers of the acquirer now benefit from that person. If your competitor knows how to make the same product but cheaper, you can buy them and now your product is cheaper.

In theory it makes tons of sense - why compete when we could work together? But as long as we're requiring companies to be profitable we can't also expect them to make decisions that are net beneficial - only net profitable, and the profit motive for wiping out competitors is clear

This is also ignoring the kinda simple case of buying for IP - if you're a toy maker and you want to sell toys for movies, you can do that for free if you also own the movie and avoid licensing fees. Or maybe you need some specific patent and a competitor won't license it to you as long as they're in business because then you legally have to work at a disadvantage - IP is kinda by definition meant to hurt consumers for a period as a reward for the holder, so removing that would make the products better

> Why are acquisitions legal?

It'd take at least semester of public policy, a semester of economics, a semester of history, and a semester of legal studies to adequately answer that.

The shorter answer is that nonnatutal persons and natural persons have the same rights to do what they want with their property, barring very specific exemptions. One of those exemptions is monopolies, but (and add this to the list of shit Ronald fucking Reagan and the university of chicago screwed up, too) in the 1980s US anti-monopoly enforcement switched from focusing on ensuring a competitive marketplace to focusing on ensuring economic efficiency and consumer welfare, so it became much much much easier to merge and acquire competitors.

That question is debated, and for good reason. I'm a fan of the limitations based on market cap and valuations. We really have done a terrible job at upholding Sherman's Antitrust act, instead allowing the very thing it was attempting to prevent, to come true. All under the facade of "innovation".

Most arguments I've read on the issue are very telling. Arguments like we can't regulate M&A because they'll just invest elsewhere without M&A regulations. Which is great for several reasons: we should not want to protect companies that would that easily go elsewhere, and this assumes people need the company far more than the company needs people which is a gigantic problem in itself.

Because people generally have the right to negotiate and form agreements with one another, that being one of the basic applications of free association. Every time a company buys a part it uses to build a product, or hires a contractor to do a specialized job, it's doing the same fundamental thing as it is in an acquisition.

That doesn't make the right unlimited; it isn't, and arguably it should be more tightly regulated. But disallowing acquisitions as a matter of policy would lead to weird results nobody wants.

We don't legally limit companies or people to only doing things that are net beneficial to other people.

Anybody use this? Either the cloud service or the open source command line file sync app?

I've dabbled with the latter, but not much besides that.

Yeah, I used the command line sync. It was great. I was running my development environment on a virtual machine in the cloud and I could edit all the files locally so I had no lag. Worked really well.

I used it with Docker for Mac locally back when bind mounted volumes on Mac were perilously slow. From the article though it looks like the focus is on remote containers.

Yes I started using this in the past year. It dramatically sped up my watch/test cycle on mac.

It seems like something that shouldn't be necessary on Mac with docker so I hope they just make it a standard docker feature.

I use it with ddev for local development.

https://ddev.readthedocs.io/

I set it up for a team of ~30. This makes a huge difference for mounting things like `node_modules` with lots of inodes. The difference locally is pretty astounding.

I've been using it with vagrant. It's an amazing file sync between host and guest. Avoids so many of the annoyances of nfs et al

Use it for sync between dev instances and local. Works very well. It's one of those things that once you set it up gets out of your way and let's you do your work.

Kinda astonishing how some startup with almost no revenue that burned through hundreds millions of dollars is still able to acquire anything x)

> Kinda astonishing how some startup with almost no revenue that burned through hundreds millions of dollars is still able to acquire anything x)

As of December, Docker was doing $100M+ of ARR[0]. No where close to no revenue

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/asethi_docker-the-phoenix-sag...

For all the hate it gets, it's astounding what you can accomplish by charging for your product.

It's why OrbStack will also start charging once the open beta period is over.

The part that was doing no rev was Docker Enterprise. This was sold off to Mirantis [0]. This was a good thing for both Mirantis and Docker. The Mirantis brass knew the enterprise much better than the ignorant leadership that was running the ship prior to the acquisition. I happened to be there at the time. Folks like Steve Singh (former CEO), Roger Egan (SVP Sales) and Betty Junod (VP Product & Product Marketing) were all ignorant to what could have been a very successful run with Docker Enterprise. They were literally trying to hock everything customers already had and didn't want from Docker. What customers kept asking for was what Docker is doing today. While they've had a number of missteps the current leadership clearly understands their target market and... Listens. Steve, Roger and Betty? They always knew better and didn't listen to their own people. It was bizzaro-land where Betty's quest to define personas was the answer to all of Docker's woes. Looking back the entire thing felt like a season of Silicon Valley.

But yeah, if you think Docker doesn't have any runway these days you haven't followed much of them over the last few years.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mirantis-acquires-docker-enter...

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