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Grudge? You mean when Jessie Frazelle walked around dockercon with a badge saying, “I will not merge patches for systemd” just out of principal? In hindsight it

by SEJeff 6y ago

Grudge? You mean when Jessie Frazelle walked around dockercon with a badge saying, “I will not merge patches for systemd” just out of principal? In hindsight it is fairly obvious picking a fight at redhat summit was a very poor long term strategy from docker. It forced them to ultimately sell the orchestration parts of their business and massively limit the free tier of docker hub.

zapita 6y ago
Thank you for illustrating my point perfectly. “Grudge?” (proceeds with details of grudge).
- kbenson 6y ago
  What was described could be the basis of a grudge, or it could be that Red Hat were convinced that the current project would not accept changes Red Hat would benefit by even if it helped many other people. At that point, and at the size of Red Hat and how important this technology is becoming for them, it only makes sense for them to secure some of the technological foundations they rely on. It costs them very little in resources in relation to the business they are basing on that technology. I don't think it's a stretch to look at the events as described and see them as Red Hat doing what they need to work around someone else's grudge. It could be any number of things, but I don't think the information presented so far lends itself towards Red Hat having a grudge.
  - zapita 6y ago
    runc, containerd and the docker client are critical infrastructure to a whole lot of people, and they seem to be doing just fine running it and, when needed, contributing back. Only Red Hat seems to have a problem with using those projects without forking or re-writing them. Could it be because Red Hat considers it of strategic importance for their business, not just for those projects to be reliable (they are), but to be controlled by them to a sufficient degree that they can act as gatekeepers to upstream, thus preserving their business model?
    - kbenson 6y ago
      That could be, but if Frazelle did actually walk around with a button saying “I will not merge patches for systemd” I think it's simpler and safer to assume Red Hat decided that relying on Docker was risky given how important it was to their future products and the apparent animus on display from the Docker maintainer. If I carpool with someone and they like to go around and loudly proclaim "I refuse to listen to anything kbenson has to say", maybe I find someone else to carpool with or drive myself? That only seems prudent. That doesn't mean I have a grudge against that person, it just means I don't want to trust them with getting me to and from work anymore.
      - zapita 6y ago
        It’s no secret that there were tensions betwen Docker and Red Hat that culminated around 2016, when Red Hat’s desire to capitalize on the success of containers ran into Docker’s own ambitions to compete with Red Hat. Those tensions were eventually resolved (or at least diminished) by Red Hat shifting gears to Kubernetes as their “next Linux”. The drama you’re talking about is from that period - 2015-16. But “crun” was launched in 2020, a full four years later. Frazelle left Docker years ago, as well as most of the people involved in those feuds. Runc, containerd and docker are chugging along drama-free, and are maintained by multi-vendor teams. There is no interest from anyone outside of Red Hat in forking or re-writing those tools. It’s just a tremendous waste of energy and in the end will be problematic for Red Hat, because they will be building their platform on less used and therefore less reliable code. The world’s container infrastructure runs on containerd, runc and docker. Not crio, crun and podman. Someone at Red Hat clearly is having trouble accepting that reality, in my opinion because they’re having trouble moving on from old grudges. I really wish they did, because all of that wasted engineering effort could be deployed to solve more pressing problems.
        kbenson 6y ago
        > It’s just a tremendous waste of energy > The world’s container infrastructure runs on containerd, runc and docker I don't consider alternate implementations of widely used software to be wasted evergy almost ever. Was Clang a waste of energy because everyone was using GCC? There are many reasons why multiple implementations may be useful, competition and being able to cater to slightly different common use cases obvious ones. I'm not sure why any end user would wish for there not to be multiple open source projects looking to satisfy a similar technical need. > in the end will be problematic for Red Hat That may be, but I don't really care about whether it's good for Red Hat. I care that it increased user choice and maybe at some point features and capabilities offered to users (whether through podman or pressure on docker).

by SEJeff 6y ago

zapita 6y ago

Thank you for illustrating my point perfectly. “Grudge?” (proceeds with details of grudge).

kbenson 6y ago
What was described could be the basis of a grudge, or it could be that Red Hat were convinced that the current project would not accept changes Red Hat would benefit by even if it helped many other people. At that point, and at the size of Red Hat and how important this technology is becoming for them, it only makes sense for them to secure some of the technological foundations they rely on. It costs them very little in resources in relation to the business they are basing on that technology. I don't think it's a stretch to look at the events as described and see them as Red Hat doing what they need to work around someone else's grudge. It could be any number of things, but I don't think the information presented so far lends itself towards Red Hat having a grudge.
- zapita 6y ago
  runc, containerd and the docker client are critical infrastructure to a whole lot of people, and they seem to be doing just fine running it and, when needed, contributing back. Only Red Hat seems to have a problem with using those projects without forking or re-writing them. Could it be because Red Hat considers it of strategic importance for their business, not just for those projects to be reliable (they are), but to be controlled by them to a sufficient degree that they can act as gatekeepers to upstream, thus preserving their business model?
  - kbenson 6y ago
    That could be, but if Frazelle did actually walk around with a button saying “I will not merge patches for systemd” I think it's simpler and safer to assume Red Hat decided that relying on Docker was risky given how important it was to their future products and the apparent animus on display from the Docker maintainer. If I carpool with someone and they like to go around and loudly proclaim "I refuse to listen to anything kbenson has to say", maybe I find someone else to carpool with or drive myself? That only seems prudent. That doesn't mean I have a grudge against that person, it just means I don't want to trust them with getting me to and from work anymore.
    - zapita 6y ago
      It’s no secret that there were tensions betwen Docker and Red Hat that culminated around 2016, when Red Hat’s desire to capitalize on the success of containers ran into Docker’s own ambitions to compete with Red Hat. Those tensions were eventually resolved (or at least diminished) by Red Hat shifting gears to Kubernetes as their “next Linux”. The drama you’re talking about is from that period - 2015-16. But “crun” was launched in 2020, a full four years later. Frazelle left Docker years ago, as well as most of the people involved in those feuds. Runc, containerd and docker are chugging along drama-free, and are maintained by multi-vendor teams. There is no interest from anyone outside of Red Hat in forking or re-writing those tools. It’s just a tremendous waste of energy and in the end will be problematic for Red Hat, because they will be building their platform on less used and therefore less reliable code. The world’s container infrastructure runs on containerd, runc and docker. Not crio, crun and podman. Someone at Red Hat clearly is having trouble accepting that reality, in my opinion because they’re having trouble moving on from old grudges. I really wish they did, because all of that wasted engineering effort could be deployed to solve more pressing problems.
      - kbenson 6y ago
        > It’s just a tremendous waste of energy > The world’s container infrastructure runs on containerd, runc and docker I don't consider alternate implementations of widely used software to be wasted evergy almost ever. Was Clang a waste of energy because everyone was using GCC? There are many reasons why multiple implementations may be useful, competition and being able to cater to slightly different common use cases obvious ones. I'm not sure why any end user would wish for there not to be multiple open source projects looking to satisfy a similar technical need. > in the end will be problematic for Red Hat That may be, but I don't really care about whether it's good for Red Hat. I care that it increased user choice and maybe at some point features and capabilities offered to users (whether through podman or pressure on docker).