24 ms·

A new upstream project to break up Docker into independent components

571 points by lclarkmichalek 10y ago

tmaly 10y ago
Why change the name? All the books and posts reference the name Docker.
- e1ven 10y ago
  It looks like they want to rename the OSS version, to differentiate it from their commercial version. They're using the analogy of Fedora->RHEL. Moby = open source development Docker CE = free product release based on Moby Docker EE = commercial product release based on Docker CE.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    Why doesn't the open-source predecessor have precedence?
    - jazzyb 10y ago
      Because people are more likely to pay for the more recognized name.
    - jakemoshenko 10y ago
      Because there are no engineers storming the office of the CTO demanding that they buy Moby. There is a lot of brand value in the name Docker.
  - chrisshroba 10y ago
    What exactly is the difference between Moby and Docker CE?
    - bonesss 10y ago
      Docker Community Edition is the Docker you've always heard about, now with an Enterprise big brother (Docker EE). Moby is a set of standardizable tools that underly that product which might be shared with OS suppliers, Kubernetes, or other virtualization solutions. If you want containers for your apps, you want Docker. If you're bundling containerization components into your Linux distro/orchestration platform/custom hybrid cloud solution then Moby will be your swiss army knife :)
    - dwaite 10y ago
      Docker is a brand and a product, that product does a bunch of stuff beyond the simplest levels of letting download or build images and run containers - such as SDN, physical clustering, hardware provisioning, and service orchestration with load balancing and automatic management. A lot of the community understands that "docker" has gained a lot of features, but they may not understand it is because Docker is the name of an integrated product suite a company wants to sell. These features are added because Docker, Inc. wants to have commercial offering containing a full technology stack around containerization, a community offering to attract people to their stack, and open source backing the community offering so that enterprises don't get fearful of vendor lock-in. But other companies want to use containerization. And Docker doesn't mean anything in their context, because they only want to use a few pieces and swap the rest for their own. In fact, they are resistant against using Docker because 1. It is iffy whether they could use the trademark, even if they were ok marketing a competing product 2. They don't have the same voice in the technical decisions of the open source project Moby is an attempt to solve these issues: - It is a project with a vendor neutral name - Presumably, it will be managed in a way that gives vendors somewhat equal footing - It makes it clearer that the pieces are containers, etc, the project that develops all the open-source pieces is moby, and one of the products that integrates all the pieces is docker. It is similar to how RedHat split out Fedora, except that RedHat didn't see the value in having a RedHat-branded community edition.
detaro 10y ago
previously: discussion of the announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139691
bru 10y ago
More information can be found there: https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 > Docker is transitioning all of its open source collaborations to the Moby project going forward. Should I understand that the core team wants to keep the brand "Docker" but use it in a commercial way, while Moby will be the underlying open source code? Is it Docker/Moby = RHEL/Fedora ? or Docker/Moby = Mongodb.com/Mongodb.org?
- octo_t 10y ago
  from https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 as well: > defining an open, community-centric governance inspired by the Fedora project
  - tcrews 10y ago
    That's a great idea. I really trust Red Hat and they have consistently delivered. I don't think the same applies to Docker Inc. so my initial reaction is step on the brakes here.
- Jabbermonkey 10y ago
  Also from that thread: Moby = open source development Docker CE = free product release based on Moby Docker EE = commercial product release based on Docker CE. Nothing is dead; and everything that was open-source remains open-source. In fact we are open-sourcing new things.
  - zamalek 10y ago
    So essentially the difference between Chromium and Chrome?
    - unixhero 10y ago
      No, that would not be accurate. The difference between them is like Redhat Enterprise Linux (Costs Money, Enterprise Supported) vs CentOS (Community managed, community supported, Libre Free)
valarauca1 10y ago
Are we getting ishmaeld now?
- api 10y ago
  They could have ishmaeld to monitor mobyd and ahabd to kill mobyd if it misbehaves.
Chris2048 10y ago
Moby dock?
kibwen 10y ago
Indeed, it seems that github.com/docker/docker now redirects to this. From a technological perspective it's irrelevant, but from a brand management perspective it's baffling. Did they perceive the Docker brand as tainted in some way?
- pilif 10y ago
  > Did they perceive the Docker brand as tainted in some way? quite to the contrary I'd say. Docker will be their commercial enterprise offering and moby will be the open source project.
  - kristianc 10y ago
    Other way round. It's historically been hard to get get someone to pay for something with an 'Open Source' brand.
- bonesss 10y ago
  The Docker brand is "tainted" in the eyes of their commercial competitors who don't want to use shared tools/libraries. By creating an independent project commercial actors in the Enterprise space can share resources, components, and standards without having to explain why they`re better than Docker even though they`re built on top of Docker. This is a great move towards industry and container infrastructure orchestration standardization. Common APIs will go a long way to widespread container adoption.
  - tcrews 10y ago
    It's not the brand that is tainted. People simply cannot trust their projects on someone else's commercial objectives. There is no indication this is changing.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      Yeah, good luck with finding a technology stack that doesn't rely on any products developed by companies...
DonHopkins 10y ago
I have no idea why they'd want to change such a great name. I am very disappointed. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=docker http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=docker
- logicallee 10y ago
  I'm sure you'll clean up your phrasing (since you're getting downvoted for some reason) but could I ask, is this something you really first thought of when you heard the name? Is it UK slang? I've never heard it. I don't think you should be downvoted for the info (even though it doesn't actually apply, they will keep the name for their commercial stuff) as it's news to me.
  - bravura 10y ago
    I was aware of the slang term "docking" in Canada and the United States. I believe it is a commonly accepted term in the gay community. See, e.g. http://www.thebody.com/h/docking-and-HIV-transmission-risk.html http://www.thebody.com/h/docking-and-HIV-transmission-risk.h...
    - logicallee 10y ago
      but you're not my parent poster...and you didn't actually answer the question about whether it had negative connotations. (specifically, the term "docker" doesn't appear on that page in that form.) I am asking whether it's the first thing my parent poster, or anyone, would first think of, for example if the project were named "wanker".
      - DonHopkins 10y ago
        Here in Amsterdam it has positive connotations in the gay community. I just want to get a Docker t-shirt before they all run out.
        logicallee 10y ago
holydude 10y ago
Why am I having the feeling that Docker Inc is being pissed about everyone making money off docker except Docker Inc. themselves ? This is not nice.
- kentt 10y ago
  Oh, because it's true. Their employees were fairly outspoken about it at Dockercon. I had one just dramatically and rudely turn and walk away from me mid-sentence when I mentioned I was using Kubernetes.
  - tcrews 10y ago
    I didn't know the animosity level was that high. This is disturbing.
  - holydude 10y ago
    This is why I hate SW business and I am very picky about services / software I use. I really dislike companies undercutting competition with practices like this.
  - shykes 10y ago
    Hi, I'm the founder of Docker. That is very surprising and absolutely not OK. I'm sorry that you experienced this. Could you contact me directly at solomon@docker.com to give me more details? There is no animosity towards kubernetes, quite the contrary. We are working with the kubernetes community to integrate the individual components of Docker, so that everyone can reuse each other's code and ideas. For example: - we're actively working on a containerd+CRI integration. - there's great technical discussions about supporting CNI in SwarmKit - we are participating in the early CSI (common storage interface) discussions along with the Mesos and Kubernetes communities. - we are discussing the possibility of participating in the Kubernetes secrets implementation work, since we invested a lot in SwarmKit secrets and some of that work could be reused, or at least discussed for reference. In short: no animosity. Not sure what happened to you at Dockercon but we will look into it.
    - 10y ago
glitcher 10y ago
Excerpts from mobyproject.org give a much better explanation: Moby is an open framework created by Docker to assemble specialized container systems without reinventing the wheel. It provides a “lego set” of dozens of standard components and a framework for assembling them into custom platforms. Audience Moby is recommended for anyone who wants to assemble a container-based system, this includes: Hackers who want to customize or patch their Docker build System engineers or integrators building a container system Infrastructure providers looking to adapt existing container systems to their environment Container enthusiasts who want to experiment with the latest container tech Open-source developers looking to test their project in a variety of different systems Anyone curious about Docker internals and how it’s built Moby is NOT recommended for: Application developers looking for an easy way to run their applications in containers. We recommend Docker CE instead. Enterprise IT and development teams looking for a ready-to-use, commercially supported container platform. We recommend Docker EE instead. Anyone curious about containers and looking for an easy way to learn. We recommend the docker.com website instead.
- ChristianGeek 10y ago
  Thank you for ELI5! (The official explanation made no sense to me at all.)
- ernestbro 10y ago
  Moby is the fedora like oss project and docker is the RHEL like commercial product. Purely a clever rebranding job. Timing is perfect - now that enterprise is adopting the technology, when you tell your boss you adopted moby he/she will say- but the CTO wants to be seen as being innovative for adopting this new technology and ita called docker not moby!
  - vosper 10y ago
    > but the CTO wants to be seen as being innovative for adopting this new technology and ita called docker not moby! I see this kind of cynicism / snark all the time on HN (especially when it comes to Docker) but is it really warranted? Surely it's the rare exception? I've never met senior people who couldn't understand the naming difference between the open source version of a thing and the enterprise-branded version. Or a CEO or President. They're not morons. This seems like cheap shots for upvotes. Or am I wrong?
pi-rat 10y ago
From comment by @stykes on the pull request: Moby = open source development Docker CE = free product release based on Moby Docker EE = commercial product release based on Docker CE. Nothing is dead; and everything that was open-source remains open-source. In fact we are open-sourcing new things.
- bandrami 10y ago
  The pre-emptive defensiveness of that comment says a lot...
  - CGamesPlay 10y ago
    Maybe. The defensiveness could likely be that in many rebrands things tend to get lost in the scuffle (e.g. documentation not fully up to date; difficult to find references to some subproject's new name; checkbox for feature still listed on the enterprise version's landing page; assumption that it was made closed-source). The devs just want to get ahead of that as much as possible.
    - grey-area 10y ago
      There is absolutely no need for this rebrand, because they're not actually getting rid of the old brand, they're trying to reuse it for something different, which is insane. Hence the defensiveness. They know this will cause problems and complaints. They can't get ahead of the complaints without actually fixing them, by reversing the decision.
  - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
    It wasn't really pre-emptive, people were already freaking out in the thread.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    And now we've come full circle to justifying the negativity with the very sentence that was inserted to defuse it... Good thing it's all OSS. Don't try to solve problems with a pitchfork, when a simple fork will do.
yeukhon 10y ago
This is the one of the worst kind of business decision one can make. But I am not theirCTO and CEO. While not the same as Vagrant being replaced (and then revived because the alternate project was a burden), feels the same shitty decision IMO. Plently of people run successful OSS under the same name. Disappointing.
- bonesss 10y ago
  I believe you might be reading the situation backwards... Dockers underlying components are quite usable for many solutions in other projects and platforms. Now, instead of having "Docker TM" components in their stack, OSS projects can connect the tools without seeming to support a specific commercial provider. Presently there is a lot of confusion and OSS projects are hesitant to use Docker components because of the perception of a closed eco-system. Now the project has clearer commercial branding and a more appealing package set for OSS consumers. Remember: many of the most important actors we need to collaborate in this space are direct commercial competitors to Docker Inc.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jacquesm 10y ago
  It's quite clever actually. First you get half the world behind your open source project and then with a little sleight of hand that suddenly becomes a valuable commercial brand. Not the first time this is done either.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    How is that clever? You just renamed your brand away and lost all the credit from it.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Because the commercial entity will keep the name so all the docker mindshare suddenly 'points' to a thing that people would have to pay for. If they had renamed the commercial stuff to Moby they'd have to start from scratch, now there are thousands of articles and links that say 'go get docker' intending to point you to the open source stuff, instead directing you to the commercial stuff. A very effective bait-and-switch.
xaduha 10y ago
This isn't April 1st, is it?
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  No, but it's 4:20.
wnevets 10y ago
This certainly won't cause any confusion going forward.
- bonesss 10y ago
  If you`ve hit the wall in between multiple container infrastructure orchestration platforms I think the potential this provides is pretty big, and will have a lot to say for Enterprise adoption. Separating out the shared commodity container stack points towards plug-and-play cross-vendor container stacks based on standardized APIs. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Azure, AWS, VmWare, Kubernetes, etc etc: todays market is a divergent mess. Being able to mix-and-match configuration tools, clustering tools, and management interfaces will get us to best-of-breed solutions. It should enable plug-and-play components that today, amidst a dizzying array of incompatibility, generally force you onto wholesale stacks. Props to Docker for investing in the shared eco-system and risking the brand confusion to push the industry towards the next step. This doesn`t impact users of Docker or containerized app devs, people won`t be setting up a Moby stackexchange site any time soon. This is big news for the devs of container platforms though :)
horsecaptin 10y ago
Sharpen the Spears?
deleted 10y ago
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alanfranzoni 10y ago
Bad title. That's not what's happening. Moby is the name of the open source project.
colept 10y ago
What about all the SEO, Stack overflow questions, and the differentiation between the two(?) platforms?
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  Dunno about SEO, but the SO/other questions shouldn't be too big a problem I imagine - the end-use related questions will still be in the right namespace.
- user5994461 10y ago
  The SEO is not a problem. 1) It's not conflicting with anything major (Unless it does, short 4 letters names are way too common). 2) It will transfer along the URL redirections 3) Docker has enough credit and following to gather SEO on any new domain and product name that comes out The new pages will be top links on google very quickly. No worries about that, machines are fine! The trouble is with humans, they can't keep up. All the existing content -documentation, community, articles- will stay under the Docker name, forever splitting the knowledge and bringing confusion onto mankind.
bauerd 10y ago
If I read this correctly they split up the Docker repository into several components. The moby repo pulls these together and spits out a build (or many builds?). So for instance one might choose an alternative container runtime to containerd? Then there's an officially supported set of components from which they build Docker CE. But why is Docker now called moby? Doesn't make sense to me.
heeey 10y ago
This is a bait and switch of whale proportions. Docker used to be the open source part. Now that's being moved out of the way so when you search for Docker you get the paid offerings. The goal is to confuse the people who haven't been following this into thinking Docker is a thing you pay Docker (the company) for. It's brilliant.
- stephenr 10y ago
  > The goal is to confuse the people who haven't been following this into thinking Docker is a thing you pay Docker (the company) for Following the first thing they google without actually understanding what's involved, all the way to handing over money sounds about what I expect from someone who thinks Docker is a viable platform to use for anything worth handing over money for.
  - heeey 10y ago
    That's not quite how it works. - Decision maker googles and finds there's this Docker company that will solve their problems. Heard good buzz about Docker in the news, how open it is, and how many companies use it. - Decision maker to engineer: "Hey can we use Docker software to solve problem X" - Engineer: "Sure, the software is actually called Moby now though" - Decision maker: "Meh, I don't care what it's called, I just want problem X solved. Docker solves it?" - Engineer: "Yeah I guess" - Decision maker: "Ok here's your budget. Pay Docker to solve problem X." - Engineer: "Alright"
    - matt4077 10y ago
      - Decision maker: "Also, do you really think I'm some sort of walking caricature of doofus management? And if so–what, exactly, is, in your estimation, the overlap of 'has absolutely no clue' and 'has heard of Docker'. Because sure as hell the CEO doesn't know anything about Docker. And while I'm the CTO, it happens that I, like quite a few of these decision-makers, came through the technical ranks. I compiled kernels when you weren't even born! So just once, I would wish you wouldn't attack some ridiculous straw-man of an argument, but the strongest possible argument which I could make. That's what I try to do, and it's why I'm the CTO, and yes, playing golf right now. Cheerio!"
amq 10y ago
Seems to be done hastily - why?
wesleytodd 10y ago
I do not understand the amount of negative feedback on this. It seems logical to me to move the underlying open source components to a separate org from the proprietary stuff. Why the hate?
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Honestly I think it makes sense as well but the way it was announced it was so incredibly confusing that I find myself agreeing with some of the negative and positive comments here depending on what my state of understanding was at the time.
- deleted 10y ago
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nikcub 10y ago
What a horrible title. Docker isn't being renamed to Moby, but rather all of the open source components are being spun out into a new umbrella OSS org called Moby. No need to s/docker/moby anywhere. This is going to end up being a case study in how not to make announcements, because the news is otherwise big/interesting.
- rc_kas 10y ago
  Your comment is the only one in this whole thread that anyone needs to read.
  - kordless 10y ago
    Yup, and your's as well, by extension. I'd add that the rebrand needed to happen, given naming a company and a product the same thing is never a good idea.
    - sampwing 10y ago
      Except the company and product still have the same name, it is just the open source project's name which is changing.
      - kordless 10y ago
        I suppose at this point we should ask ourselves why everyone keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. That's irrationality defined. You appear to be disagreeing with something I said, so I have to assume it's based on the assertion that naming a company AND product the same thing is usually a bad idea, at least for marketing purposes. The confusion that has arisen with other products in the past is real, and it's clear that people are confused with this move. That's why I said it. I didn't say it to be completely precise about what happened, because people aren't precise in understanding how companies market to them. It's a common mistake in marketing, of which I am moderately skilled, or so I hear. Anyway, I would say, in general terms, that reality is perceived differently from person to person. This means that some may conceptually map a concept to a word in a completely different way than another. That some are confused about this particular change in mapping is a good indication that my recommendation is a sound one, where the product, company, project and repo should be called different things to avoid branding confusion[1] when the consumer is making a decision. I would also add that this behavior of companies "being confused" in return to people's confusion resulting from a change in branding of something is also an indication of irrationality. And, it's also blaming in tone to assume people should "just get it" when these things are executed on poorly, at least marketing-wise. [1] https://hbr.org/2002/03/brand-confusion https://hbr.org/2002/03/brand-confusion
tcrews 10y ago
It's time for a foundation if they are serious about this.
pbreit 10y ago
Can this piece of the puzzle really support a venture funded company? I get RedHat, that's a complete operating system. And Mongo, the database is a huge chunk of a system. But Docker seems definitionally a tiny sliver of the overall ball of wax.
- tyingq 10y ago
  I think that's the problem they are trying to solve. They want people to be buying their higher level stuff, container management, orchestration, etc. But all the attention is on the lower-level container runtime. And, their competition at the higher level is starting to abstract away from their runtime. Like this: https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/cri-o https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/cri-o
api 10y ago
So devops conferences will no longer sound like "Docker docker Docker? Docker. Docker docker docker docker? Ahh, Docker docker Docker docker docker." Now they'll sound like "Moby moby moby...?" This seems absurd from a branding point of view. I personally find this a little bit vindicating. I'm 39, which is like 120 in programmer years. I feel like one of the advantages of being an "old" (in quotes!) programmer is that I'm pretty good at spotting a fad. Unfortunately whenever I point one out I get mocked and down voted to oblivion, so I've learned to just sit on the sidelines and watch the fads go past and just work to avoid them in my own projects. Programming is very faddish, and I've seen fads come and go. Here's a few of the ones I've seen in my tenure: - "Design patterns" heavy "enterprise" programming, such as commonly seen in the older work in the Java and .NET ecosystem. - XML for everything. - Agile. Oh god, agile. - Test driven development. - Dynamic languages (as productivity magic pixie dust). - Service oriented architecture (SOA). ... I could go on. Not everything in these fads is bad. Fads often contain good ideas and some fads contain non-fad elements that stick around. But they're fads insofar as they are over-hyped as magic cure-alls. The key characteristic of a fad is this: It's heavily hyped as a cure to some set of very hard problems in programming or system administration, but all it really does is move the problem somewhere else or hack around it in some trivial gimmicky way. There is no real innovation. Meanwhile the fad often introduces new problems that nobody thinks about until the shine wears off. My simple heuristic for recognizing a fad is to ask "where's the innovation?" A real innovation is a conceptual leap forward. It has a certain "meaty" feel to it and seems worthy of at least one solid CS paper. It often reduces complexity, since when deployed you can now dispense with all the mountains of hacks you used to work around the problem prior to the innovation. Here's some current things that I very strongly think are fads: - Microservices, which is just a reboot of SOA. The idea is not inherently bad and often results in more scalable systems, but the faddish part is the idea that replacing local API calls with RPC API calls or event queues is going to make some major class of programming problems go away. No, and you've also just introduced a new set of problems around network unreliability. - "Serverless" cloud, a.k.a. total lock-in to a proprietary mainframe. Everyone doing this is going to regret it in 5-10 years except Amazon's shareholders. It's a roach motel. Compute will get another order of magnitude cheaper and prices for everything else will drop accordingly, but these prices will not since you drank the kool-aid haha. - Containers. ... yes, containers. Like most fads, containers are a response to a real set of problems. These are mainly: - System/VM configuration drift and variability. - Dependency and DLL hell. - The fact that Linux/Unix has devolved into a single-tenant operating system where it's hard to deploy more than one thing on one "server." (This debacle is deserving of a whole very long blog post.) Containers are a fad because they don't address any of those problems with real innovation. System configuration drift, dependencies, and DLL hell are are addressed by the gimmicky hack of basically tar'ing up whole Linux images and treating them like gigantic statically linked binaries. If you're going to do that, why do you need Docker/moby/whatever? Just use a static Linux distribution like http://sta.li http://sta.li and run every service in its own home or chroot. Keep your service trees in git and manage systems with Chef, Puppet, or f'ing shell scripts. I fail to see why orchestration (a.k.a. provisioning) systems like Kubernetes could not work in such an environment without the container cruft. Containers don't solve multi-tenancy much in practice. Their security profile is not good enough for true multi-tenancy, and if you try to run too many on one server you're going to run into stability problems that derive from all the bugs that exist in all that extra complexity they add. Real solutions to these problems would... you know... really solve them. A real solution would make it possible to deploy stuff easily and forget about DLL and dependency hell. A real solution would restore true multi-tenancy to Unix, allowing users (not root) to install and run services on commodity identically-configured Unix systems. A real solution would reduce complexity. Edit: I do wonder a little if the idea of throwing out dynamic linking, which both containers and some newer compilers like Go do, is not a bad idea. Maybe it's obsolete. Maybe the tiny memory savings of dynamic linking are no longer justified by the complexity overhead of dependency management.
shykes 10y ago
Hi all, Docker founder here. It appears that the explanation in the pull request is not very clear. Sorry about that. We didn't expect the PR to be the first thing people read: there is a new website at mobyproject.org. Unfortunately Github is struggling under the load, and I can't update the PR text to clarify. Here is an updated version with some clarifications: <<< Docker is transitioning all of its open source collaborations to the Moby project going forward. During the transition, all open source activity should continue as usual. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you are a Docker user, this does not change anything. Docker CE continues to exist as a downstream open-source product, with exactly the same interface, packages and release cycle. This change is about the upstream development of the components of Docker, and making that process more open and modular. Moby is not a replacement for Docker: it's a framework to help system engineers build platforms like Docker out of many components. We use Moby to build Docker, but you can use it to build specialized systems other than Docker. You can learn more at http://mobyproject.org http://mobyproject.org We are proposing the following list of changes: - splitting up the engine into more open components - removing the docker UI, SDK etc to keep them in the Docker org - clarifying that the project is not limited to the engine, but to the assembly of all the individual components of the Docker platform - open-source new tools & components which we currently use to assemble the Docker product, but could benefit the community - defining an open, community-centric governance inspired by the Fedora project (a very successful example of balancing the needs of the community with the constraints of the primary corporate sponsor) >>> EDIT: I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions here, if it helps clarify.
- alsadi 10y ago
  Tell us more about trademark and branding guidelines. What do you allow a downstream implemented by others to be called without requiring trademark fees ex by parties similar to amazon (public cloud) or ovh (data center) or redhat/fedora (software vendor) and even nvidia (cuda docker-like) . For example fedora and firefox has strict trademark policy eventhough they are opensource. Can I call my tool moby-something?
  - shykes 10y ago
    For the Docker trademark, we will adopt guidelines similar to other open-source products, such as Ubuntu or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For Moby, there is no need for a strict trademark policy because Moby is a "meta-platform". In other words downstreams don't run Moby: they build their own specialized platform with moby. So they don't need to worry about the Moby trademark anymore than they need to worry about the trademark of gcc or make. Anyone who uses Moby to build their platform will be more than welcome to say "built with Moby".
omidraha 10y ago
Is there any wiki page of moby project on the WikiPedia? This is not related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Project
SadWebDeveloper 10y ago
So Docker is now called Moby or Moby is the OSS version of what i believe it will be the "enterprise" version of Docker. Like RedHat is to Fedora, Docker is to Moby right?
- dwaite 10y ago
  Think how RedHat is the name of a company and an operating system product (RHEL) assembled from the pieces in Fedora. Docker is the name of a company and a container management product (Enterprise and Community Editions) assembled from the pieces in Moby.
stephenr 10y ago
What is it with tech companies and fucking terrible name/branding analogies? Docker. Ok, works with containers I get... wait. Your logo is a WHALE with a bunch of shipping containers on it. You know that whales DISAPPEAR underwater for hours at a time, and shipping containers are NOT MEANT TO DO THAT? Ok ok maybe it was an honest mistake hey whats this new thing moby.. wait. Whales. Moby. Moby dick? Your project is named after a mythical white whale that sank boats, the very thing that actually carry CONTAINERS. Having said all that, based on this [1] summary of Docker's usefulness in production from February, maybe both names are absolutely on-point for the reality of this abysmal 'product'. 1. https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-update/ https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-upd...
- Khao 10y ago
  A+ post. Funny rambling backed up by a crazy well detailed article and you get downvoted by the HN hive mind. Docker is the ...ahem... whale in the room that you shouldn't criticize ever!
  - user5994461 10y ago
    Author of the article here! Just updated the titles to include moby. Maybe I should change the links as well, then it can get reposted on HN and reach the first page along the announcement :D
    - mdekkers 10y ago
      Love your articles. Thanks for taking the time and effort to write it up and put it online.
  - w8rbt 10y ago
    Hah... no that's rust, not docker ;)
- JCharante 10y ago
  Moby was the perfect name for a chaos monkey docker equivalent.
_jezell_ 10y ago
Please rename to Moby Dock instead.
- rmoriz 10y ago
  Docker Failwhale Edition
munin 10y ago
They should have just re-branded to qwikster.
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kelsus 10y ago
Shoulda called it d suite.
sandGorgon 10y ago
@shykes - so im one of the lonely few that love Docker Swarmkit (not Swarm - cos, that would be too confusing right !). I have spent a lot of time in the Kubernetes ecosystem (including several SIG) and value the batteries-included setup that Docker Swarm brings. More recently, I was part of a discussion where Kubernetes has decided to roll its own logging infrastructure, while leaving important parts like log rotation still undecided.... driving me even closer to the Docker ecosystem. However, it seems that Swarmkit is a big casualty of the whole CE/EE (and now Moby) split. Docker EE (https://www.docker.com/enterprise-edition https://www.docker.com/enterprise-edition) still does not mention Swarmkit anywhere. In fact, there is NO top-level page on Docker's own site that actually mentions Swarmkit [1] and even Docker "Swarm-mode" is part of some second level documentation and help pages. It makes me really worried about how you are seeing Swarm-mode/Swarmkit as part of the long term future of Docker Inc. You guys really dont talk about it - not even on twitter. I'm assuming this is your handle as well (https://twitter.com/dockerswarm https://twitter.com/dockerswarm), which has not seen a tweet since Jan 2017. However, you guys do tweet a lot about "Docker Datacenter". What's going on ? [1] https://www.google.co.in/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:docker.com+swarmkit https://www.google.co.in/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1...
- alexk 10y ago
  > More recently, I was part of a discussion where Kubernetes has decided to roll its own logging infrastructure, while leaving important parts like log rotation still undecided.... driving me even closer to the Docker ecosystem. Can you please refer to this particular discussion and link to it here, I would like to make sure that this indeed is what happened.
  - thockingoog 10y ago
    I don;t think that is really what happened. :) As part of the runtime abstraction, kubernetes must necessarily decide how to handle stdout/stderr logs. Not having a decision for something at a given point in time is not exactly a bad thing.
    - 10y ago
thedangler 10y ago
Not to be rude or anything but the people in charge of such changes need to take a class in change management.
akerro 10y ago
Wow, so much documentation, blogs, keywords, adsesnse and stackoverflow to update! Better hurry!
breerly 10y ago
Searched "runc" on this page - 0 found :(
amouat 10y ago
Personally, I think this a great move for the community, but the reasoning and implications could have been made a little clearer. The intention is to have a clearer split between the Open Source community project - which is and will always be the heart of Docker (or now Moby) and the "product" pieces. The Docker product itself is not changing at all from an external perspective - you will still call "docker run" as before. However, Docker will be an "assembly" of pieces from the moby project plus some under the docker namespace, probably including "docker/docker-cli". Going forward, this will allow the docker-cli to make more product-centric moves like further Hub integration that would be too controversial for the community moby project. It also allows other organisations to take the moby code and reassemble it in different ways without offending the Docker "product". Furthermore, the intention is that in the long run, various Moby pieces will move to community foundations such as the CNCF and OCI.
w8rbt 10y ago
Bargey or Tanky may have been a better name.

571 points by lclarkmichalek 10y ago

tmaly 10y ago

Why change the name? All the books and posts reference the name Docker.

e1ven 10y ago
It looks like they want to rename the OSS version, to differentiate it from their commercial version. They're using the analogy of Fedora->RHEL. Moby = open source development Docker CE = free product release based on Moby Docker EE = commercial product release based on Docker CE.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Why doesn't the open-source predecessor have precedence?
  - jazzyb 10y ago
    Because people are more likely to pay for the more recognized name.
  - jakemoshenko 10y ago
    Because there are no engineers storming the office of the CTO demanding that they buy Moby. There is a lot of brand value in the name Docker.
- chrisshroba 10y ago
  What exactly is the difference between Moby and Docker CE?
  - bonesss 10y ago
    Docker Community Edition is the Docker you've always heard about, now with an Enterprise big brother (Docker EE). Moby is a set of standardizable tools that underly that product which might be shared with OS suppliers, Kubernetes, or other virtualization solutions. If you want containers for your apps, you want Docker. If you're bundling containerization components into your Linux distro/orchestration platform/custom hybrid cloud solution then Moby will be your swiss army knife :)
  - dwaite 10y ago
    Docker is a brand and a product, that product does a bunch of stuff beyond the simplest levels of letting download or build images and run containers - such as SDN, physical clustering, hardware provisioning, and service orchestration with load balancing and automatic management. A lot of the community understands that "docker" has gained a lot of features, but they may not understand it is because Docker is the name of an integrated product suite a company wants to sell. These features are added because Docker, Inc. wants to have commercial offering containing a full technology stack around containerization, a community offering to attract people to their stack, and open source backing the community offering so that enterprises don't get fearful of vendor lock-in. But other companies want to use containerization. And Docker doesn't mean anything in their context, because they only want to use a few pieces and swap the rest for their own. In fact, they are resistant against using Docker because 1. It is iffy whether they could use the trademark, even if they were ok marketing a competing product 2. They don't have the same voice in the technical decisions of the open source project Moby is an attempt to solve these issues: - It is a project with a vendor neutral name - Presumably, it will be managed in a way that gives vendors somewhat equal footing - It makes it clearer that the pieces are containers, etc, the project that develops all the open-source pieces is moby, and one of the products that integrates all the pieces is docker. It is similar to how RedHat split out Fedora, except that RedHat didn't see the value in having a RedHat-branded community edition.

detaro 10y ago

previously: discussion of the announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139691

bru 10y ago

More information can be found there: https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 > Docker is transitioning all of its open source collaborations to the Moby project going forward. Should I understand that the core team wants to keep the brand "Docker" but use it in a commercial way, while Moby will be the underlying open source code? Is it Docker/Moby = RHEL/Fedora ? or Docker/Moby = Mongodb.com/Mongodb.org?

octo_t 10y ago
from https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/32691 as well: > defining an open, community-centric governance inspired by the Fedora project
- tcrews 10y ago
  That's a great idea. I really trust Red Hat and they have consistently delivered. I don't think the same applies to Docker Inc. so my initial reaction is step on the brakes here.
Jabbermonkey 10y ago
Also from that thread: Moby = open source development Docker CE = free product release based on Moby Docker EE = commercial product release based on Docker CE. Nothing is dead; and everything that was open-source remains open-source. In fact we are open-sourcing new things.
- zamalek 10y ago
  So essentially the difference between Chromium and Chrome?
  - unixhero 10y ago
    No, that would not be accurate. The difference between them is like Redhat Enterprise Linux (Costs Money, Enterprise Supported) vs CentOS (Community managed, community supported, Libre Free)

valarauca1 10y ago

Are we getting ishmaeld now?

api 10y ago
They could have ishmaeld to monitor mobyd and ahabd to kill mobyd if it misbehaves.

Chris2048 10y ago

Moby dock?

kibwen 10y ago

Indeed, it seems that github.com/docker/docker now redirects to this. From a technological perspective it's irrelevant, but from a brand management perspective it's baffling. Did they perceive the Docker brand as tainted in some way?

pilif 10y ago
> Did they perceive the Docker brand as tainted in some way? quite to the contrary I'd say. Docker will be their commercial enterprise offering and moby will be the open source project.
- kristianc 10y ago
  Other way round. It's historically been hard to get get someone to pay for something with an 'Open Source' brand.
bonesss 10y ago
The Docker brand is "tainted" in the eyes of their commercial competitors who don't want to use shared tools/libraries. By creating an independent project commercial actors in the Enterprise space can share resources, components, and standards without having to explain why they`re better than Docker even though they`re built on top of Docker. This is a great move towards industry and container infrastructure orchestration standardization. Common APIs will go a long way to widespread container adoption.
- tcrews 10y ago
  It's not the brand that is tainted. People simply cannot trust their projects on someone else's commercial objectives. There is no indication this is changing.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Yeah, good luck with finding a technology stack that doesn't rely on any products developed by companies...

DonHopkins 10y ago

I have no idea why they'd want to change such a great name. I am very disappointed. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=docker http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=docker

logicallee 10y ago
I'm sure you'll clean up your phrasing (since you're getting downvoted for some reason) but could I ask, is this something you really first thought of when you heard the name? Is it UK slang? I've never heard it. I don't think you should be downvoted for the info (even though it doesn't actually apply, they will keep the name for their commercial stuff) as it's news to me.
- bravura 10y ago
  I was aware of the slang term "docking" in Canada and the United States. I believe it is a commonly accepted term in the gay community. See, e.g. http://www.thebody.com/h/docking-and-HIV-transmission-risk.html http://www.thebody.com/h/docking-and-HIV-transmission-risk.h...
  - logicallee 10y ago
    but you're not my parent poster...and you didn't actually answer the question about whether it had negative connotations. (specifically, the term "docker" doesn't appear on that page in that form.) I am asking whether it's the first thing my parent poster, or anyone, would first think of, for example if the project were named "wanker".
    - DonHopkins 10y ago
      Here in Amsterdam it has positive connotations in the gay community. I just want to get a Docker t-shirt before they all run out.
      - logicallee 10y ago

holydude 10y ago

Why am I having the feeling that Docker Inc is being pissed about everyone making money off docker except Docker Inc. themselves ? This is not nice.

kentt 10y ago
Oh, because it's true. Their employees were fairly outspoken about it at Dockercon. I had one just dramatically and rudely turn and walk away from me mid-sentence when I mentioned I was using Kubernetes.
- tcrews 10y ago
  I didn't know the animosity level was that high. This is disturbing.
- holydude 10y ago
  This is why I hate SW business and I am very picky about services / software I use. I really dislike companies undercutting competition with practices like this.
- shykes 10y ago
  Hi, I'm the founder of Docker. That is very surprising and absolutely not OK. I'm sorry that you experienced this. Could you contact me directly at solomon@docker.com to give me more details? There is no animosity towards kubernetes, quite the contrary. We are working with the kubernetes community to integrate the individual components of Docker, so that everyone can reuse each other's code and ideas. For example: - we're actively working on a containerd+CRI integration. - there's great technical discussions about supporting CNI in SwarmKit - we are participating in the early CSI (common storage interface) discussions along with the Mesos and Kubernetes communities. - we are discussing the possibility of participating in the Kubernetes secrets implementation work, since we invested a lot in SwarmKit secrets and some of that work could be reused, or at least discussed for reference. In short: no animosity. Not sure what happened to you at Dockercon but we will look into it.
  - 10y ago

glitcher 10y ago

Excerpts from mobyproject.org give a much better explanation: Moby is an open framework created by Docker to assemble specialized container systems without reinventing the wheel. It provides a “lego set” of dozens of standard components and a framework for assembling them into custom platforms. Audience Moby is recommended for anyone who wants to assemble a container-based system, this includes: Hackers who want to customize or patch their Docker build System engineers or integrators building a container system Infrastructure providers looking to adapt existing container systems to their environment Container enthusiasts who want to experiment with the latest container tech Open-source developers looking to test their project in a variety of different systems Anyone curious about Docker internals and how it’s built Moby is NOT recommended for: Application developers looking for an easy way to run their applications in containers. We recommend Docker CE instead. Enterprise IT and development teams looking for a ready-to-use, commercially supported container platform. We recommend Docker EE instead. Anyone curious about containers and looking for an easy way to learn. We recommend the docker.com website instead.

ChristianGeek 10y ago
Thank you for ELI5! (The official explanation made no sense to me at all.)
ernestbro 10y ago
Moby is the fedora like oss project and docker is the RHEL like commercial product. Purely a clever rebranding job. Timing is perfect - now that enterprise is adopting the technology, when you tell your boss you adopted moby he/she will say- but the CTO wants to be seen as being innovative for adopting this new technology and ita called docker not moby!
- vosper 10y ago
  > but the CTO wants to be seen as being innovative for adopting this new technology and ita called docker not moby! I see this kind of cynicism / snark all the time on HN (especially when it comes to Docker) but is it really warranted? Surely it's the rare exception? I've never met senior people who couldn't understand the naming difference between the open source version of a thing and the enterprise-branded version. Or a CEO or President. They're not morons. This seems like cheap shots for upvotes. Or am I wrong?

pi-rat 10y ago

From comment by @stykes on the pull request: Moby = open source development Docker CE = free product release based on Moby Docker EE = commercial product release based on Docker CE. Nothing is dead; and everything that was open-source remains open-source. In fact we are open-sourcing new things.

bandrami 10y ago
The pre-emptive defensiveness of that comment says a lot...
- CGamesPlay 10y ago
  Maybe. The defensiveness could likely be that in many rebrands things tend to get lost in the scuffle (e.g. documentation not fully up to date; difficult to find references to some subproject's new name; checkbox for feature still listed on the enterprise version's landing page; assumption that it was made closed-source). The devs just want to get ahead of that as much as possible.
  - grey-area 10y ago
    There is absolutely no need for this rebrand, because they're not actually getting rid of the old brand, they're trying to reuse it for something different, which is insane. Hence the defensiveness. They know this will cause problems and complaints. They can't get ahead of the complaints without actually fixing them, by reversing the decision.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  It wasn't really pre-emptive, people were already freaking out in the thread.
- matt4077 10y ago
  And now we've come full circle to justifying the negativity with the very sentence that was inserted to defuse it... Good thing it's all OSS. Don't try to solve problems with a pitchfork, when a simple fork will do.

yeukhon 10y ago

This is the one of the worst kind of business decision one can make. But I am not theirCTO and CEO. While not the same as Vagrant being replaced (and then revived because the alternate project was a burden), feels the same shitty decision IMO. Plently of people run successful OSS under the same name. Disappointing.

bonesss 10y ago
I believe you might be reading the situation backwards... Dockers underlying components are quite usable for many solutions in other projects and platforms. Now, instead of having "Docker TM" components in their stack, OSS projects can connect the tools without seeming to support a specific commercial provider. Presently there is a lot of confusion and OSS projects are hesitant to use Docker components because of the perception of a closed eco-system. Now the project has clearer commercial branding and a more appealing package set for OSS consumers. Remember: many of the most important actors we need to collaborate in this space are direct commercial competitors to Docker Inc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 10y ago
It's quite clever actually. First you get half the world behind your open source project and then with a little sleight of hand that suddenly becomes a valuable commercial brand. Not the first time this is done either.
- user5994461 10y ago
  How is that clever? You just renamed your brand away and lost all the credit from it.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Because the commercial entity will keep the name so all the docker mindshare suddenly 'points' to a thing that people would have to pay for. If they had renamed the commercial stuff to Moby they'd have to start from scratch, now there are thousands of articles and links that say 'go get docker' intending to point you to the open source stuff, instead directing you to the commercial stuff. A very effective bait-and-switch.

xaduha 10y ago

This isn't April 1st, is it?

DonHopkins 10y ago
No, but it's 4:20.

wnevets 10y ago

This certainly won't cause any confusion going forward.

bonesss 10y ago
If you`ve hit the wall in between multiple container infrastructure orchestration platforms I think the potential this provides is pretty big, and will have a lot to say for Enterprise adoption. Separating out the shared commodity container stack points towards plug-and-play cross-vendor container stacks based on standardized APIs. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Azure, AWS, VmWare, Kubernetes, etc etc: todays market is a divergent mess. Being able to mix-and-match configuration tools, clustering tools, and management interfaces will get us to best-of-breed solutions. It should enable plug-and-play components that today, amidst a dizzying array of incompatibility, generally force you onto wholesale stacks. Props to Docker for investing in the shared eco-system and risking the brand confusion to push the industry towards the next step. This doesn`t impact users of Docker or containerized app devs, people won`t be setting up a Moby stackexchange site any time soon. This is big news for the devs of container platforms though :)

horsecaptin 10y ago

Sharpen the Spears?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

alanfranzoni 10y ago

Bad title. That's not what's happening. Moby is the name of the open source project.

colept 10y ago

What about all the SEO, Stack overflow questions, and the differentiation between the two(?) platforms?

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
Dunno about SEO, but the SO/other questions shouldn't be too big a problem I imagine - the end-use related questions will still be in the right namespace.
user5994461 10y ago
The SEO is not a problem. 1) It's not conflicting with anything major (Unless it does, short 4 letters names are way too common). 2) It will transfer along the URL redirections 3) Docker has enough credit and following to gather SEO on any new domain and product name that comes out The new pages will be top links on google very quickly. No worries about that, machines are fine! The trouble is with humans, they can't keep up. All the existing content -documentation, community, articles- will stay under the Docker name, forever splitting the knowledge and bringing confusion onto mankind.

bauerd 10y ago

If I read this correctly they split up the Docker repository into several components. The moby repo pulls these together and spits out a build (or many builds?). So for instance one might choose an alternative container runtime to containerd? Then there's an officially supported set of components from which they build Docker CE. But why is Docker now called moby? Doesn't make sense to me.

heeey 10y ago

This is a bait and switch of whale proportions. Docker used to be the open source part. Now that's being moved out of the way so when you search for Docker you get the paid offerings. The goal is to confuse the people who haven't been following this into thinking Docker is a thing you pay Docker (the company) for. It's brilliant.

stephenr 10y ago
> The goal is to confuse the people who haven't been following this into thinking Docker is a thing you pay Docker (the company) for Following the first thing they google without actually understanding what's involved, all the way to handing over money sounds about what I expect from someone who thinks Docker is a viable platform to use for anything worth handing over money for.
- heeey 10y ago
  That's not quite how it works. - Decision maker googles and finds there's this Docker company that will solve their problems. Heard good buzz about Docker in the news, how open it is, and how many companies use it. - Decision maker to engineer: "Hey can we use Docker software to solve problem X" - Engineer: "Sure, the software is actually called Moby now though" - Decision maker: "Meh, I don't care what it's called, I just want problem X solved. Docker solves it?" - Engineer: "Yeah I guess" - Decision maker: "Ok here's your budget. Pay Docker to solve problem X." - Engineer: "Alright"
  - matt4077 10y ago
    - Decision maker: "Also, do you really think I'm some sort of walking caricature of doofus management? And if so–what, exactly, is, in your estimation, the overlap of 'has absolutely no clue' and 'has heard of Docker'. Because sure as hell the CEO doesn't know anything about Docker. And while I'm the CTO, it happens that I, like quite a few of these decision-makers, came through the technical ranks. I compiled kernels when you weren't even born! So just once, I would wish you wouldn't attack some ridiculous straw-man of an argument, but the strongest possible argument which I could make. That's what I try to do, and it's why I'm the CTO, and yes, playing golf right now. Cheerio!"

amq 10y ago

Seems to be done hastily - why?

wesleytodd 10y ago

I do not understand the amount of negative feedback on this. It seems logical to me to move the underlying open source components to a separate org from the proprietary stuff. Why the hate?

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Honestly I think it makes sense as well but the way it was announced it was so incredibly confusing that I find myself agreeing with some of the negative and positive comments here depending on what my state of understanding was at the time.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

nikcub 10y ago

What a horrible title. Docker isn't being renamed to Moby, but rather all of the open source components are being spun out into a new umbrella OSS org called Moby. No need to s/docker/moby anywhere. This is going to end up being a case study in how not to make announcements, because the news is otherwise big/interesting.

rc_kas 10y ago
Your comment is the only one in this whole thread that anyone needs to read.
- kordless 10y ago
  Yup, and your's as well, by extension. I'd add that the rebrand needed to happen, given naming a company and a product the same thing is never a good idea.
  - sampwing 10y ago
    Except the company and product still have the same name, it is just the open source project's name which is changing.
    - kordless 10y ago
      I suppose at this point we should ask ourselves why everyone keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. That's irrationality defined. You appear to be disagreeing with something I said, so I have to assume it's based on the assertion that naming a company AND product the same thing is usually a bad idea, at least for marketing purposes. The confusion that has arisen with other products in the past is real, and it's clear that people are confused with this move. That's why I said it. I didn't say it to be completely precise about what happened, because people aren't precise in understanding how companies market to them. It's a common mistake in marketing, of which I am moderately skilled, or so I hear. Anyway, I would say, in general terms, that reality is perceived differently from person to person. This means that some may conceptually map a concept to a word in a completely different way than another. That some are confused about this particular change in mapping is a good indication that my recommendation is a sound one, where the product, company, project and repo should be called different things to avoid branding confusion[1] when the consumer is making a decision. I would also add that this behavior of companies "being confused" in return to people's confusion resulting from a change in branding of something is also an indication of irrationality. And, it's also blaming in tone to assume people should "just get it" when these things are executed on poorly, at least marketing-wise. [1] https://hbr.org/2002/03/brand-confusion https://hbr.org/2002/03/brand-confusion

tcrews 10y ago

It's time for a foundation if they are serious about this.

pbreit 10y ago

Can this piece of the puzzle really support a venture funded company? I get RedHat, that's a complete operating system. And Mongo, the database is a huge chunk of a system. But Docker seems definitionally a tiny sliver of the overall ball of wax.

tyingq 10y ago
I think that's the problem they are trying to solve. They want people to be buying their higher level stuff, container management, orchestration, etc. But all the attention is on the lower-level container runtime. And, their competition at the higher level is starting to abstract away from their runtime. Like this: https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/cri-o https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/cri-o

api 10y ago

So devops conferences will no longer sound like "Docker docker Docker? Docker. Docker docker docker docker? Ahh, Docker docker Docker docker docker." Now they'll sound like "Moby moby moby...?" This seems absurd from a branding point of view. I personally find this a little bit vindicating. I'm 39, which is like 120 in programmer years. I feel like one of the advantages of being an "old" (in quotes!) programmer is that I'm pretty good at spotting a fad. Unfortunately whenever I point one out I get mocked and down voted to oblivion, so I've learned to just sit on the sidelines and watch the fads go past and just work to avoid them in my own projects. Programming is very faddish, and I've seen fads come and go. Here's a few of the ones I've seen in my tenure: - "Design patterns" heavy "enterprise" programming, such as commonly seen in the older work in the Java and .NET ecosystem. - XML for everything. - Agile. Oh god, agile. - Test driven development. - Dynamic languages (as productivity magic pixie dust). - Service oriented architecture (SOA). ... I could go on. Not everything in these fads is bad. Fads often contain good ideas and some fads contain non-fad elements that stick around. But they're fads insofar as they are over-hyped as magic cure-alls. The key characteristic of a fad is this: It's heavily hyped as a cure to some set of very hard problems in programming or system administration, but all it really does is move the problem somewhere else or hack around it in some trivial gimmicky way. There is no real innovation. Meanwhile the fad often introduces new problems that nobody thinks about until the shine wears off. My simple heuristic for recognizing a fad is to ask "where's the innovation?" A real innovation is a conceptual leap forward. It has a certain "meaty" feel to it and seems worthy of at least one solid CS paper. It often reduces complexity, since when deployed you can now dispense with all the mountains of hacks you used to work around the problem prior to the innovation. Here's some current things that I very strongly think are fads: - Microservices, which is just a reboot of SOA. The idea is not inherently bad and often results in more scalable systems, but the faddish part is the idea that replacing local API calls with RPC API calls or event queues is going to make some major class of programming problems go away. No, and you've also just introduced a new set of problems around network unreliability. - "Serverless" cloud, a.k.a. total lock-in to a proprietary mainframe. Everyone doing this is going to regret it in 5-10 years except Amazon's shareholders. It's a roach motel. Compute will get another order of magnitude cheaper and prices for everything else will drop accordingly, but these prices will not since you drank the kool-aid haha. - Containers. ... yes, containers. Like most fads, containers are a response to a real set of problems. These are mainly: - System/VM configuration drift and variability. - Dependency and DLL hell. - The fact that Linux/Unix has devolved into a single-tenant operating system where it's hard to deploy more than one thing on one "server." (This debacle is deserving of a whole very long blog post.) Containers are a fad because they don't address any of those problems with real innovation. System configuration drift, dependencies, and DLL hell are are addressed by the gimmicky hack of basically tar'ing up whole Linux images and treating them like gigantic statically linked binaries. If you're going to do that, why do you need Docker/moby/whatever? Just use a static Linux distribution like http://sta.li http://sta.li and run every service in its own home or chroot. Keep your service trees in git and manage systems with Chef, Puppet, or f'ing shell scripts. I fail to see why orchestration (a.k.a. provisioning) systems like Kubernetes could not work in such an environment without the container cruft. Containers don't solve multi-tenancy much in practice. Their security profile is not good enough for true multi-tenancy, and if you try to run too many on one server you're going to run into stability problems that derive from all the bugs that exist in all that extra complexity they add. Real solutions to these problems would... you know... really solve them. A real solution would make it possible to deploy stuff easily and forget about DLL and dependency hell. A real solution would restore true multi-tenancy to Unix, allowing users (not root) to install and run services on commodity identically-configured Unix systems. A real solution would reduce complexity. Edit: I do wonder a little if the idea of throwing out dynamic linking, which both containers and some newer compilers like Go do, is not a bad idea. Maybe it's obsolete. Maybe the tiny memory savings of dynamic linking are no longer justified by the complexity overhead of dependency management.

shykes 10y ago

Hi all, Docker founder here. It appears that the explanation in the pull request is not very clear. Sorry about that. We didn't expect the PR to be the first thing people read: there is a new website at mobyproject.org. Unfortunately Github is struggling under the load, and I can't update the PR text to clarify. Here is an updated version with some clarifications: <<< Docker is transitioning all of its open source collaborations to the Moby project going forward. During the transition, all open source activity should continue as usual. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you are a Docker user, this does not change anything. Docker CE continues to exist as a downstream open-source product, with exactly the same interface, packages and release cycle. This change is about the upstream development of the components of Docker, and making that process more open and modular. Moby is not a replacement for Docker: it's a framework to help system engineers build platforms like Docker out of many components. We use Moby to build Docker, but you can use it to build specialized systems other than Docker. You can learn more at http://mobyproject.org http://mobyproject.org We are proposing the following list of changes: - splitting up the engine into more open components - removing the docker UI, SDK etc to keep them in the Docker org - clarifying that the project is not limited to the engine, but to the assembly of all the individual components of the Docker platform - open-source new tools & components which we currently use to assemble the Docker product, but could benefit the community - defining an open, community-centric governance inspired by the Fedora project (a very successful example of balancing the needs of the community with the constraints of the primary corporate sponsor) >>> EDIT: I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions here, if it helps clarify.

alsadi 10y ago
Tell us more about trademark and branding guidelines. What do you allow a downstream implemented by others to be called without requiring trademark fees ex by parties similar to amazon (public cloud) or ovh (data center) or redhat/fedora (software vendor) and even nvidia (cuda docker-like) . For example fedora and firefox has strict trademark policy eventhough they are opensource. Can I call my tool moby-something?
- shykes 10y ago
  For the Docker trademark, we will adopt guidelines similar to other open-source products, such as Ubuntu or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For Moby, there is no need for a strict trademark policy because Moby is a "meta-platform". In other words downstreams don't run Moby: they build their own specialized platform with moby. So they don't need to worry about the Moby trademark anymore than they need to worry about the trademark of gcc or make. Anyone who uses Moby to build their platform will be more than welcome to say "built with Moby".

omidraha 10y ago

Is there any wiki page of moby project on the WikiPedia? This is not related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Project

SadWebDeveloper 10y ago

So Docker is now called Moby or Moby is the OSS version of what i believe it will be the "enterprise" version of Docker. Like RedHat is to Fedora, Docker is to Moby right?

dwaite 10y ago
Think how RedHat is the name of a company and an operating system product (RHEL) assembled from the pieces in Fedora. Docker is the name of a company and a container management product (Enterprise and Community Editions) assembled from the pieces in Moby.

stephenr 10y ago

What is it with tech companies and fucking terrible name/branding analogies? Docker. Ok, works with containers I get... wait. Your logo is a WHALE with a bunch of shipping containers on it. You know that whales DISAPPEAR underwater for hours at a time, and shipping containers are NOT MEANT TO DO THAT? Ok ok maybe it was an honest mistake hey whats this new thing moby.. wait. Whales. Moby. Moby dick? Your project is named after a mythical white whale that sank boats, the very thing that actually carry CONTAINERS. Having said all that, based on this [1] summary of Docker's usefulness in production from February, maybe both names are absolutely on-point for the reality of this abysmal 'product'. 1. https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-update/ https://thehftguy.com/2017/02/23/docker-in-production-an-upd...

Khao 10y ago
A+ post. Funny rambling backed up by a crazy well detailed article and you get downvoted by the HN hive mind. Docker is the ...ahem... whale in the room that you shouldn't criticize ever!
- user5994461 10y ago
  Author of the article here! Just updated the titles to include moby. Maybe I should change the links as well, then it can get reposted on HN and reach the first page along the announcement :D
  - mdekkers 10y ago
    Love your articles. Thanks for taking the time and effort to write it up and put it online.
- w8rbt 10y ago
  Hah... no that's rust, not docker ;)
JCharante 10y ago
Moby was the perfect name for a chaos monkey docker equivalent.

_jezell_ 10y ago

Please rename to Moby Dock instead.

rmoriz 10y ago
Docker Failwhale Edition

munin 10y ago

They should have just re-branded to qwikster.

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kelsus 10y ago

Shoulda called it d suite.

sandGorgon 10y ago

@shykes - so im one of the lonely few that love Docker Swarmkit (not Swarm - cos, that would be too confusing right !). I have spent a lot of time in the Kubernetes ecosystem (including several SIG) and value the batteries-included setup that Docker Swarm brings. More recently, I was part of a discussion where Kubernetes has decided to roll its own logging infrastructure, while leaving important parts like log rotation still undecided.... driving me even closer to the Docker ecosystem. However, it seems that Swarmkit is a big casualty of the whole CE/EE (and now Moby) split. Docker EE (https://www.docker.com/enterprise-edition https://www.docker.com/enterprise-edition) still does not mention Swarmkit anywhere. In fact, there is NO top-level page on Docker's own site that actually mentions Swarmkit [1] and even Docker "Swarm-mode" is part of some second level documentation and help pages. It makes me really worried about how you are seeing Swarm-mode/Swarmkit as part of the long term future of Docker Inc. You guys really dont talk about it - not even on twitter. I'm assuming this is your handle as well (https://twitter.com/dockerswarm https://twitter.com/dockerswarm), which has not seen a tweet since Jan 2017. However, you guys do tweet a lot about "Docker Datacenter". What's going on ? [1] https://www.google.co.in/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:docker.com+swarmkit https://www.google.co.in/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1...

alexk 10y ago
> More recently, I was part of a discussion where Kubernetes has decided to roll its own logging infrastructure, while leaving important parts like log rotation still undecided.... driving me even closer to the Docker ecosystem. Can you please refer to this particular discussion and link to it here, I would like to make sure that this indeed is what happened.
- thockingoog 10y ago
  I don;t think that is really what happened. :) As part of the runtime abstraction, kubernetes must necessarily decide how to handle stdout/stderr logs. Not having a decision for something at a given point in time is not exactly a bad thing.
  - 10y ago

thedangler 10y ago

Not to be rude or anything but the people in charge of such changes need to take a class in change management.

akerro 10y ago

Wow, so much documentation, blogs, keywords, adsesnse and stackoverflow to update! Better hurry!

breerly 10y ago

Searched "runc" on this page - 0 found :(

amouat 10y ago

Personally, I think this a great move for the community, but the reasoning and implications could have been made a little clearer. The intention is to have a clearer split between the Open Source community project - which is and will always be the heart of Docker (or now Moby) and the "product" pieces. The Docker product itself is not changing at all from an external perspective - you will still call "docker run" as before. However, Docker will be an "assembly" of pieces from the moby project plus some under the docker namespace, probably including "docker/docker-cli". Going forward, this will allow the docker-cli to make more product-centric moves like further Hub integration that would be too controversial for the community moby project. It also allows other organisations to take the moby code and reassemble it in different ways without offending the Docker "product". Furthermore, the intention is that in the long run, various Moby pieces will move to community foundations such as the CNCF and OCI.

w8rbt 10y ago

Bargey or Tanky may have been a better name.