Comment by tuffle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuffle | Hacker News Reader

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> Let's be real here. If Docker was 'just' an open source project, it would move at 50% of the pace and security issues like this would still not be solved.

That's wild speculation, and the elephant in the room (Linux), while a different beast, is a pretty strong counterexample for how being 'just' open source oesn't doom you to being slow or insecure.

> It's crazy to assume that if it were an open source project it would somehow get the core right faster or not expand on its ambitions.

I don't think it's crazy at all. A (say, community funded) purely open source project has no distractions and has nothing to do but to get the core right. It also has no incentive or reason to expand its ambitions.

You took Linux as an example? It took Linux 10 years (1992-2002 - kernel 2.4) to get to a stage where it's considered widely production-ready in the enterprise. And the phenomenal development rate of the 2.4+ series is thanks to corporate sponsors hiring talented developers to work on the kernel full time.

I can give you a couple of counter-counter-examples.

GIMP has been around for almost 20 years by now, but its development rate is abysmally slow, still faraway from what most people expect from a Photoshop replacement. Its progress since ~2008 hasn't been that big.

GNOME has been around for almost that long too, but it's constantly suffering from lack of man power.

The Sidekiq background worker system for Ruby is open source, but development went much faster ever since the author started monetizing on it by selling commercial licenses.

Nginx is also open source. They have much more development power now that they are a business and have a source of income. Before, it was just Igor working on it whenever he had time when he's off work.

"no incentive or reason to expand its ambitions"

with a nod towards systemd.

Linux is not a counterexample. The only reason it looks different is that the primary gatekeeper and a few key developers are paid jointly and circuitously by the sponsoring companies.

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