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Docker Inc's antagonistic attitude towards Red Hat and personal attacks on their engineers was the beginning of the end for them. The people who really headline

Docker Inc's antagonistic attitude towards Red Hat and personal attacks on their engineers was the beginning of the end for them. The people who really headlined those attacks are now gone, but the damage was done. Docker made it clear from the beginning they had no desire to be part of a community and now the community is leaving them behind. Good riddance.

axaxs 6y ago
Any good source/summary of the above? I guess I'm out of the loop, but attacking a company as trusted as Red Hat seems a bad idea.
- andrewguenther 6y ago
  It's difficult to dig up old drama when "Docker" is in your Google search, but this article gives a peek: https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/ https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/
  - zapita 6y ago
    Every time there’s drama about Docker being mean, it’s almost always a Red Hat employee behind it... Like this article, and the OP blog post. Maybe just a coincidence.
    - X-Istence 6y ago
      The op has posted in this thread that they are no longer at Red Hat... so your comment is wrong.
      - zapita 6y ago
        I’m talking about the lwn article. The post is by an ex-RH employee and clearly influenced by their experience at RH.
        andrewguenther 6y ago
        What is the claim here? That Red Hat are the ones being bullies and are misrepresenting the situation?
        zapita 6y ago
        That clearly there has been a conflict between Red Hat and Docker employees in the past, and that when Red Hat employees tell their version of the story which happens to make them look good and the opposite side look bad, one should take that narrative with a grain of salt. Especially when one side is 100x larger and more powerful than the other by any metric: number of people, revenue, marketing and PR budget. Are we really supposed to believe uncritically that Red Hat, a publicly traded company with billions of revenue and an army of engineers at their command, are being bullied by a startup of what, a couple hundred people? I’m sure the people at Docker did behave badly in some way to piss off people at Red Hat, but whenever I dig into the underlying facts, it’s always something silly and sometimes ridiculous. I’ve seen a talk by a Red Engineer dedicated entirely to the topic of how mean Docker maintainers were to him. The actual offense was 1) refusing to merge certain PRs Red Hat deemed important, 2) a tweet by an individual maintainer’s personal twitter account making fun of Red Hat for sending low-quality patches. That’s the kind of ridiculous petty food fights this whole “Docker vs the world” drama is built on. I mean, who cares? TLDR: the real story is probably more complicated than “everything was great then Docker was mean and then they failed because they were mean, the end” and best told by a less biased source.
        koffiezet 6y ago
        Yeah I followed Docker from the very beginning, and this was also what I remembered. The biggest incident, if I remember well, was related to the layerfs stuff, which was supported by Ubuntu, but which RH refused to include. Instead they pretty arrogantly pushed to merge a PR which was breaking other stuff in Docker, and were pissed when the maintainers refused to. That whole thing obviously rubbed people working on Docker the wrong way, which was the beginning of the pretty sour relationship. After that I don't think there was a lot of goodwill from Docker towards RH, probably causing a lot more issues..
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Thanks for this link. That's terrific info.
manigandham 6y ago
If you say those people are gone then what's still clear about it or why is it good riddance?
benjaminwootton 6y ago
Yeah. They were massively arrogant as a company and set of individuals. They threw me off the Docker Captains programme for saying that Rancher was a good product. Hilarious!
wmf 6y ago
Docker Inc put themselves in an impossible situation because they wanted Docker to be a standard and also be a massively profitable monopoly but they didn't have enough moat to pull it off. Red Hat and Google saw the monopolization coming and aggressively commoditized Docker for the good of the community but also for their own benefit. Now the last battle is over Docker Hub.
- wp381640 6y ago
  and they've shot themselves in the foot with Docker Hub with the rate throttling similar to npm though they'll keep getting second chances since it's the default namespace in the cli

axaxs 6y ago

Any good source/summary of the above? I guess I'm out of the loop, but attacking a company as trusted as Red Hat seems a bad idea.

andrewguenther 6y ago
It's difficult to dig up old drama when "Docker" is in your Google search, but this article gives a peek: https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/ https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/
- zapita 6y ago
  Every time there’s drama about Docker being mean, it’s almost always a Red Hat employee behind it... Like this article, and the OP blog post. Maybe just a coincidence.
  - X-Istence 6y ago
    The op has posted in this thread that they are no longer at Red Hat... so your comment is wrong.
    - zapita 6y ago
      I’m talking about the lwn article. The post is by an ex-RH employee and clearly influenced by their experience at RH.
      - andrewguenther 6y ago
        What is the claim here? That Red Hat are the ones being bullies and are misrepresenting the situation?
        zapita 6y ago
        That clearly there has been a conflict between Red Hat and Docker employees in the past, and that when Red Hat employees tell their version of the story which happens to make them look good and the opposite side look bad, one should take that narrative with a grain of salt. Especially when one side is 100x larger and more powerful than the other by any metric: number of people, revenue, marketing and PR budget. Are we really supposed to believe uncritically that Red Hat, a publicly traded company with billions of revenue and an army of engineers at their command, are being bullied by a startup of what, a couple hundred people? I’m sure the people at Docker did behave badly in some way to piss off people at Red Hat, but whenever I dig into the underlying facts, it’s always something silly and sometimes ridiculous. I’ve seen a talk by a Red Engineer dedicated entirely to the topic of how mean Docker maintainers were to him. The actual offense was 1) refusing to merge certain PRs Red Hat deemed important, 2) a tweet by an individual maintainer’s personal twitter account making fun of Red Hat for sending low-quality patches. That’s the kind of ridiculous petty food fights this whole “Docker vs the world” drama is built on. I mean, who cares? TLDR: the real story is probably more complicated than “everything was great then Docker was mean and then they failed because they were mean, the end” and best told by a less biased source.
        koffiezet 6y ago
        Yeah I followed Docker from the very beginning, and this was also what I remembered. The biggest incident, if I remember well, was related to the layerfs stuff, which was supported by Ubuntu, but which RH refused to include. Instead they pretty arrogantly pushed to merge a PR which was breaking other stuff in Docker, and were pissed when the maintainers refused to. That whole thing obviously rubbed people working on Docker the wrong way, which was the beginning of the pretty sour relationship. After that I don't think there was a lot of goodwill from Docker towards RH, probably causing a lot more issues..
- freedomben 6y ago
  Thanks for this link. That's terrific info.

manigandham 6y ago

If you say those people are gone then what's still clear about it or why is it good riddance?

benjaminwootton 6y ago

Yeah. They were massively arrogant as a company and set of individuals. They threw me off the Docker Captains programme for saying that Rancher was a good product. Hilarious!

wmf 6y ago

Docker Inc put themselves in an impossible situation because they wanted Docker to be a standard and also be a massively profitable monopoly but they didn't have enough moat to pull it off. Red Hat and Google saw the monopolization coming and aggressively commoditized Docker for the good of the community but also for their own benefit. Now the last battle is over Docker Hub.

wp381640 6y ago
and they've shot themselves in the foot with Docker Hub with the rate throttling similar to npm though they'll keep getting second chances since it's the default namespace in the cli