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Comment by radioradioradio | Hacker News Reader

Seems like (according to the author) whatever docker is doing it is a sign of their immediate demise and everyone on HN is cheering for the company to go down in flames no matter what.

The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem? Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they just stay stagnant? Has made hardened images free instead of making that a premium feature only for people in banks? - and monitising SLAs, how is that a problem?

Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using, but apparently at the same time Docker is deeply irrelevant and should not make money - while all of us on HN with well paid tech jobs get to have high thoughts on their every move to pay their employees and investors...

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I agree with a lot of the above, but then there's:

> Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using

I need to fact check that one. runc was donated by Docker to OCI a while back. And containerd was created under the CNCF from a lot of Docker code and ideas. podman is sitting on the RedHat containers stack, which has their own code base. Docker itself uses runc and containerd, and so do most Kubernetes deployments. Many of these tools go to containerd directly without deploying the Docker engine.

> containerd was created under the CNCF from a lot of Docker code and ideas

No. containerd was created by Docker, as part of a refactoring of dockerd, then later donated to cncf. Over time it gained a healthy base of maintainers from various companies. It is the most successful of Docker's cncf contributions. But it was not created under the CNCF.

> Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman

Podman? Podman appears to have reimplemented basically everything. What runtime are you talking about?

Hub.

What do you mean? There is a website called Docker Hub. There is a competing product, affiliated with Podman, called Quay, which is also a website and an on-prem solution that I think you can pay for and also an open-source product:

https://github.com/quay/quay

> There is a competing product, affiliated with Podman, called Quay

Most stuff is not published on Quay; most podman users use Docker Hub or Compose files.

> Most stuff is not published on Quay; most podman users use Docker Hub

or GHCR, etc. Docker Hub is hardly a “runtime”.

> or Compose files.

Compose files aren’t a replacement for Docker Hub. And Podman has a reimplementation of compose.

> Docker Hub is hardly a “runtime”.

In the context of your question Hub makes sense, as it is something Docker maintains that most podman users still rely on

> Compose files aren’t a replacement for Docker Hub.

Correct, but most compose files refer to Docker Hub.

You seem to be highlighting that alternatives, which I don't dispute, but most people are overwhelmingly using the services that Docker maintain. That's the answer to your question. Read up a few replies if you've forgotten the context.

> The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem?

Docker Desktop, among other things, is not open source and is not free.

Open Core is not something that people who care about software freedoms engage in. It’s what proprietary software makers engaging in open source cosplay do.

to the respondants above - you are right - that lacked nuance

Look at the maintainer lists of containerd and moby, which are used by loads of others, several docker employees on those lists - I didn't check what their amount of involvement is compared to other companies, nor whether they are even sanctioned by docker to do the work, but afaik those projects came out of OCI with Docker as one of the primary backers.

OP is wrong. Docker created containerd, then donated to cncf, then other contributors joined.

Not really, rancher, containerd, podman don't depend on Docker other than offering a compatibility layer for tools that expect talking to the real Docker.

containerd is the lower half of dockerd, spun out by Docker as a standalone open source project. It remains a core component of Docker.

I stand corrected on that one, however it was then another piece of the stack they ended up losing as added value.

The spinning out of containerd is best understood in combination with the launch of Docker Desktop, which was not open source, and later became the main source of revenue.

Docker in its entirety was at risk of being wrapped as a commodity component. By spinning out lower-level components under a different brand, they (we) made it possible to keep control of the Docker brand, and use it to sell value-added products.

Source: I'm the founder of Docker.

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