I'm the creator of Mutagen, happy to answer any questions that I can about the project, acquisition, or anything else!
I hope you made bank while the ship continues to sink.
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.
Was it a change in your own views toward user freedom (and an abandonment of free software ideology) or a practical matter?
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.
[2] https://www.docker.com/blog/mutagen-acquisition/#mutagen-faq
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.