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Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

  > if Docker could have just stuck to running containers

Do you argue the same for Amazon with AWS? They should have just stuck to running VMs on EC2 backed by S3? Amazon should not have added databases, scaling, load balancing, caching, DNS, email, search, analytics, etc. and left that up to the community to provide? Do you argue that Amazon has taken an embrace-extend-extinguish approach to AWS?

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A lot of people have this fear. Amazon is a quickly expanding platform with a growing level of lock-in and immense power. This isn't good for the ecosystem - a dominant company can charge a premium, and choice is good.

Full disclosure: I say this as a founder of a higher-level cloud service (Zencoder) that Amazon decided to compete with head-on. We're doing just fine, thanks (growing quickly, differentiated product), but Amazon is aggressively expanding upstream and is going to continue to do so.

AWS started as an open-source community project boasting contributions from over 650 contributors?

Recent post by Docker CEO Golub:

  There are over 650 contributors (95% of whom do not work for Docker, Inc.).

http://blog.docker.com/2014/11/docker-governance-advisory-bo...

That's a non-sequitur. Are you trying to suggest a relationship between an open-source project with many contributors and a requirement to avoid building a complete platform? If so, could you provide an argument behind your statement?

If you looked at volume of commits it might tell a different story - I'd imagine commits by contributor would follow a power law, so you might well have a project where 5% of the contributors made more than 50% of the commits, for example.

Take a look at the article, there is detailed comparative data on volume, response time, merge rate, split by Docker inc employees and non-employees.

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