> It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business. While you have a point in genera

> It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business. While you have a point in general, I don't think that was a primary reason for Joyent losing the "cloud wars". At the most you can say is that passionate engineering doesn't always lead to commercial success. > I respect that they’ve created their entire networking stack from the ground up. Few can claim the same. But objectively, the less eyeballs on a piece of code, the more risk. What will the company do if they’re hit by a bus? AFAICT, they didn't write their own network stack from the ground up but based it on OpenSolaris and many of the devs were former Sun employees. That's far from "write you own network stack". Joyent started in 2004, when Linux didn't have DTrace, containers, and likely didn't compare in networking performance, so it would've made a lot of sense to run a cloud startup on an OpenSolaris base. They also shared drivers and network code with IllumOS and other OpenSolaris forks. Not exactly a bus factor of 1. Joyent was one of the first container companies, which were based on OpenSolaris Zones, but seem to have just missed the "Docker" container wave. That and Joyent never quite hit on the same developer-oriented Docker CLI and Dockerfiles otherwise, who knows what would have happened. I still think of Zones as superior to Linux namcespaces/conainter setup in many aspects, much less back in the early 2012-2014 when containers were just becoming "a thing". Nowadays it's mute with AWS's Firecracker and CPU support for virtualization there's essentially no performance penalty for VM's like back in 2012.