6 ms·

A bigger issue is the fact that they were not able to become a unicorn despite having a tremendously popular product. It means there is no money in development

A bigger issue is the fact that they were not able to become a unicorn despite having a tremendously popular product. It means there is no money in development tools innovation. This is not a good thing for the software community as it means all tooling innovation will only done and controlled by the FAANGs.

santoshalper 6y ago
I don't think that's a good read on the situation. I think a better analysis is that there is no money being what amounts to a facade on top of an operating system/kernel capability. All the real novelty and challenge to containers is in the OS itself. Everything else is more or less ease of use, which is important but relatively easy to replicate. In the span of 5 years or so, Docker went from being critical glue code to cruft.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  That facade enabled millions to have easy access to that particular kernel feature. BSD jail's have been around for decades without mass adoption.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    I think the GP's point is that alternatives can easily spring up when the main feature-set/value is in the kernel rather than the glue code.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    BSD jails weren't widely adopted because the BSDs themselves weren't widely adopted by the time the industry got to the point where something like Docker was increasingly seen as necessary. I remember being involved in one project that had to decide this exact question in the very early days of Docker - jails were much more stable back then, but customers wanted Linux containers, not "sufficiently Linux-like".
freedomben 6y ago
I work for Red Hat but I'm a long time fan and user of Docker. I don't think that's what this means at all honestly. Docker (the company) made some poor decisions that led to their troubles. I'm not here to crap on docker, but they quit investing in and moving their tool forward because they were focused on the EE offering. This opened the door for "competitors" to do the things docker wasn't doing (daemonless, rootless, cgroups v2, just a few). They also did things that scared people, like the whole "moby" rename thing. It made people worried that (fairly or not) Docker the company didn't have the best intentions for the open source version. They had poor direction on product. They would routinely refuse nice features that people wanted (many that included PRs) for things with terse, unkind "do not want" rejections, and then 6 months later they would end up adding it anyway. Some of these were suspected to be refused so as not to allow open source docker to compete with EE feature sets. docker-compose was the worst at this (To be fair I think it was mostly one very loud/very powerful person wrt docker-compose). Docker started the race way ahead of everyone. To this day people still use the name "docker" to generically refer to containers. Anyway, my point is not to crap on docker, just to say that in my opinion, in so many areas important to an open source leader, they made decisions that undermined their long term outlook.
- m463 6y ago
  for me it seemed: - they stopped evolving the Dockerfile. Really this is the complexity killer that developers just "get". (also they wouldn't have their entire API cloned if they were moving it forward) - they subtly force everything through docker hub and conveniently forgot to do something like let people have a local repo. (redhat lets you define a local repo with --add-registry) - telemetry. I went to install it on macos and it started collecting telemetry the moment I launched the installer.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Great points. I think they started requiring an email and sign up too for the Mac download, although if you had a deep link that would still work but if you didn't already have it you had to sign up.
pjmlp 6y ago
Because the FOSS generation feels entitled to be paid while refusing to pay for tools, which leaves the typical enterprise customers as the only place one can make money with development tooling.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  That's not true. As a FOSS lover, I pay for a lot of tools. Both development related and unrelated. Moreover, some of the tools that I pay extend on FOSS software (Tower, Viscosity, Permute) and some of are FOSS already (Cyberduck). The thing is, as a person I don't want to feel ripped off. I don't subscribe to JetBrains since my work doesn't require these tools (also, I use Eclipse for 15+ years and it works well). The subscription culture allows developer to pump features indefinitely but, I can't subscribe to all tools that I like. There are many services that I subscribe too (Dropbox, Spotify, Netflix, IFTTT premium, Evernote, etc.) but, they give me a service which touches my life everyday. I have no budget to subscribe to a tool to test for a year. It's not feasible. I need to eat. So yes, I'd rather have a good FOSS tool which doesn't want $100+ from me every year and I'd rather patch it myself. But, if you provide me a good service which I can't replicate easily, or don't want to manage myself, I'd pay you good money. I'd be also very happy if the tool I'm paying is FOSS. Also the biggest obstacle driving me away from paying is the tools are closed source and I'd be locked in if the tool/company lets out the magic smoke. All the services I pay are not locking me in. I can get my data out of them. So it's not always wanting to earn money for free.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    In my opinion, the Jetbrains tools are very affordable when compared with the huge productivity boost that they grant me. I agree that intellij and eclipse are similar, but as soon as you work with C, C# or Python, there's very few good open source alternatives.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      I have no doubt about their quality and affordability. Also, the price goes down when you subscribe for a longer time. I write C/C++ and Python mainly. Eclipse CDT and PyDev are very good. Since I'm using the platform for 15+ years, I've seen its bad days too. Except some edge cases, CDT is bulletproof and works very well. PyDev is also very smart and helps me the way I need. Actually, Eclipse has the best and most sensible Git UI I've ever used. I also like Tower but, Eclipse both makes sense and helps a lot in the relevant places.
wisty 6y ago
There's no money in backends unless you have a great enterprise sales team. SAS, Matlab, Oracle, Arc, there's lots of really boring backend systems with plenty of FOSS alternatives but you need sales. If the customer is the developer, then they might ask their manager for a text editor with a nice UI. If the customer is the whole enterprise, then someone needs to wine and dine the CEO to get that $10,000 per core contract signed.
- TheColorYellow 6y ago
  This is a really interesting point. I work in backend enterprise software (as a consumer more than a provider). Surely the critical success component at scale is more than just "wining and dining". I truly wonder how Oracle has managed to do it for all these years...
  - wisty 6y ago
    There's also developer education (see mongo db), support, tooling, ecosystems ...
fomine3 6y ago
It seems that HashiCorp does their business well, what makes it?

santoshalper 6y ago

I don't think that's a good read on the situation. I think a better analysis is that there is no money being what amounts to a facade on top of an operating system/kernel capability. All the real novelty and challenge to containers is in the OS itself. Everything else is more or less ease of use, which is important but relatively easy to replicate. In the span of 5 years or so, Docker went from being critical glue code to cruft.

ampdepolymerase 6y ago
That facade enabled millions to have easy access to that particular kernel feature. BSD jail's have been around for decades without mass adoption.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I think the GP's point is that alternatives can easily spring up when the main feature-set/value is in the kernel rather than the glue code.
- int_19h 6y ago
  BSD jails weren't widely adopted because the BSDs themselves weren't widely adopted by the time the industry got to the point where something like Docker was increasingly seen as necessary. I remember being involved in one project that had to decide this exact question in the very early days of Docker - jails were much more stable back then, but customers wanted Linux containers, not "sufficiently Linux-like".

freedomben 6y ago

I work for Red Hat but I'm a long time fan and user of Docker. I don't think that's what this means at all honestly. Docker (the company) made some poor decisions that led to their troubles. I'm not here to crap on docker, but they quit investing in and moving their tool forward because they were focused on the EE offering. This opened the door for "competitors" to do the things docker wasn't doing (daemonless, rootless, cgroups v2, just a few). They also did things that scared people, like the whole "moby" rename thing. It made people worried that (fairly or not) Docker the company didn't have the best intentions for the open source version. They had poor direction on product. They would routinely refuse nice features that people wanted (many that included PRs) for things with terse, unkind "do not want" rejections, and then 6 months later they would end up adding it anyway. Some of these were suspected to be refused so as not to allow open source docker to compete with EE feature sets. docker-compose was the worst at this (To be fair I think it was mostly one very loud/very powerful person wrt docker-compose). Docker started the race way ahead of everyone. To this day people still use the name "docker" to generically refer to containers. Anyway, my point is not to crap on docker, just to say that in my opinion, in so many areas important to an open source leader, they made decisions that undermined their long term outlook.

m463 6y ago
for me it seemed: - they stopped evolving the Dockerfile. Really this is the complexity killer that developers just "get". (also they wouldn't have their entire API cloned if they were moving it forward) - they subtly force everything through docker hub and conveniently forgot to do something like let people have a local repo. (redhat lets you define a local repo with --add-registry) - telemetry. I went to install it on macos and it started collecting telemetry the moment I launched the installer.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Great points. I think they started requiring an email and sign up too for the Mac download, although if you had a deep link that would still work but if you didn't already have it you had to sign up.

pjmlp 6y ago

Because the FOSS generation feels entitled to be paid while refusing to pay for tools, which leaves the typical enterprise customers as the only place one can make money with development tooling.

bayindirh 6y ago
That's not true. As a FOSS lover, I pay for a lot of tools. Both development related and unrelated. Moreover, some of the tools that I pay extend on FOSS software (Tower, Viscosity, Permute) and some of are FOSS already (Cyberduck). The thing is, as a person I don't want to feel ripped off. I don't subscribe to JetBrains since my work doesn't require these tools (also, I use Eclipse for 15+ years and it works well). The subscription culture allows developer to pump features indefinitely but, I can't subscribe to all tools that I like. There are many services that I subscribe too (Dropbox, Spotify, Netflix, IFTTT premium, Evernote, etc.) but, they give me a service which touches my life everyday. I have no budget to subscribe to a tool to test for a year. It's not feasible. I need to eat. So yes, I'd rather have a good FOSS tool which doesn't want $100+ from me every year and I'd rather patch it myself. But, if you provide me a good service which I can't replicate easily, or don't want to manage myself, I'd pay you good money. I'd be also very happy if the tool I'm paying is FOSS. Also the biggest obstacle driving me away from paying is the tools are closed source and I'd be locked in if the tool/company lets out the magic smoke. All the services I pay are not locking me in. I can get my data out of them. So it's not always wanting to earn money for free.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  In my opinion, the Jetbrains tools are very affordable when compared with the huge productivity boost that they grant me. I agree that intellij and eclipse are similar, but as soon as you work with C, C# or Python, there's very few good open source alternatives.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    I have no doubt about their quality and affordability. Also, the price goes down when you subscribe for a longer time. I write C/C++ and Python mainly. Eclipse CDT and PyDev are very good. Since I'm using the platform for 15+ years, I've seen its bad days too. Except some edge cases, CDT is bulletproof and works very well. PyDev is also very smart and helps me the way I need. Actually, Eclipse has the best and most sensible Git UI I've ever used. I also like Tower but, Eclipse both makes sense and helps a lot in the relevant places.

wisty 6y ago

There's no money in backends unless you have a great enterprise sales team. SAS, Matlab, Oracle, Arc, there's lots of really boring backend systems with plenty of FOSS alternatives but you need sales. If the customer is the developer, then they might ask their manager for a text editor with a nice UI. If the customer is the whole enterprise, then someone needs to wine and dine the CEO to get that $10,000 per core contract signed.

TheColorYellow 6y ago
This is a really interesting point. I work in backend enterprise software (as a consumer more than a provider). Surely the critical success component at scale is more than just "wining and dining". I truly wonder how Oracle has managed to do it for all these years...
- wisty 6y ago
  There's also developer education (see mongo db), support, tooling, ecosystems ...

fomine3 6y ago

It seems that HashiCorp does their business well, what makes it?