9 ms·

What has Docker become?

262 points by tuananh 9mo ago

gregoryl 9mo ago
For a while, Docker seemed to focus on developer experience. ahh yes, docker desktop, where the error messages are "something went wrong", and the primary debugging step is to wipe it, uninstall, and reinstall.
- reedf1 9mo ago
  It is honestly incredible that such an important part of the Windows dev process is nearly unusable. It is easily the most fickle and opaque bit of software that I am required to depend upon.
  - hu3 9mo ago
    Yep. I used to have a ton of problems with Docker in Windows. It has been a year without problems since I enabled WSL2 engine for Docker. Honestly they should make the WSL2 Docker engine mandatory because otherwise things barely work.
    - tuananh 9mo ago
      at work, i opted for remote development workspace because of this problem. Windows & Docker ain't meant to be together :(
    - bonesss 9mo ago
      Docker on Windows issues, back before WSL had matured enough, gave a pretty compelling argument for doing windows development on OSX inside a VM.
  - throw20251220 9mo ago
    Windows is the problem, not Docker. Just try wsl2 and you’ll see…
    - breakingcups 9mo ago
      That's a very naive take. The issue is Docker Desktop, a buggy mess. I have plenty of well-functioning, complex Windows applications with detailed troubleshooting utilities.
      - throw20251220 9mo ago
        Yeah, it's all naive when it doesn't work for you. It's naive using Windows.
- FireBeyond 9mo ago
  Yup. How many years did I go where the most frequently pushed button in the Docker Desktop UI was "reset my installation"?
leetrout 9mo ago
> Docker created a standard so successful that it became infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to monetize Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. Old school robotics players have a playbook for this. You may or may not agree DBs are infra but Oracle has done well by capitalistic standards. The reality is in our economy exploitation is a basic requirement. Nothing says a company providing porcelain for Linux kernel capabilities has a right to exist. What has turned into OCI is great. Docker desktop lost on Mac to Orb stack and friends (but I guess they have caught back up?) the article does make it clear they have tried hard to find a place to leverage rent and it probably is making enough for a 10-100 person company to be very comfortable but 500-1000 seems very over grown at this point. Really should not have given up on Swarm just to come back to it. Kubernetes is over kill for so many people using it for a convenient deployment story.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  > Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. But not impossible. Terraform seems to have paid its creator quite well.
  - tuananh 9mo ago
    I think Hashicorp got out just in time. They are declining in recent years.
    - chuckadams 9mo ago
      They're IBM now, I think they just consider you and me beneath their notice. I guess some things never change.
    - b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
      They are stagnant and their dev experience is very poor.
- echelon 9mo ago
  The "Fair Source" [1] and "Fair Code" [2] licenses are sustainable and user-friendly. Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology. Imagine if Redis, Elastic, and so many other technologies could. Modern database companies will typically dual license their work so they don't have their lunch eaten. I've done it for some of my own work [3]. You want your customers to have freedom, but you don't want massive companies coming in and ripping you off. You'd also like to provide a "easy path" for payments that sustain the engineering, but not require your users to be bound to you. "OSI-approved" Open Source is an industry co-opt of labor. Amazon and Google benefit immensely with an ecosystem of things they can offer, but they in turn give you zero of the AWS/GCP code base. Hyperscalers are miles of crust around an open source interior. They charge and make millions off of the free labor of open source. I think we need a new type of license that requires that the companies using the license must make their entire operational codebases available. [1] https://fair.io/licenses/ https://fair.io/licenses/ [2] https://faircode.io/ https://faircode.io/ [3] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft/blob/main/LICENSE.md https://github.com/storytold/artcraft/blob/main/LICENSE.md
vivzkestrel 9mo ago
- well time to announce DockerVM, a super fast under 100ms boot time competitor to firecracker and gvisor and try selling this to some of the cloud providers out there - take advantage of the current agentic wave and announce a Docker Sandbox runner product that lets you run agents inside cloud sandboxes
- pploug 9mo ago
  https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/ https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/
  - vivzkestrel 9mo ago
    I was not aware of this one but I am talking about running it on the cloud like making a direct competitor to modal
- jiehong 9mo ago
  Or maybe a CI runner service?
whinvik 9mo ago
Sorry off topic question but has Docker come up with a easy to use dev solution. I always end up with using Devcontainer: it solves the sandboxed, ready to use dev env. But the actual experience with developing on VSCode with Dev Containers is not great. It's laggy and slow.
- wilsonpa 9mo ago
  Really? I work across multiple vscode projects (locally), some use dev-containers and others don't. I have never noticed any difference in experience across the two. I have also used them remotely (ssh and using tailscale) and noticed a little lag, but nothing really distracting.
  - amonith 9mo ago
    Most likely a Windows or MacOS user, where docker runs in a linux VM. Optimized as much as possible and lightweight, but still a VM.
    - okanat 9mo ago
      No, on Windows it is very quick too. On WSL2 compiling Rust programs are almost as fast as Linux on bare metal. However the files need to live inside the Linux filesystem. Sharing with Windows drives actually compiles slower than native Windows.
      - pjmlp 9mo ago
        You can use dev drives instead, I guess.
        okanat 9mo ago
        If you are building natively, yes. However the original comment is about Dev Containers which runs under WSL2. If you open a native Windows folder in VSCode and activate the Dev Container, it will use the special drvfs mounts that communicate via Plan9 to host Windows OS to access native Windows files from the Docker distro. Since it is a network layer accross two kernels, it is slow as hell.
zoobab 9mo ago
Who wants to pay for chroot?
- c0n5pir4cy 9mo ago
  Ah - the old magic. There is a lot more than a simple chroot to Docker though - with FreeBSD Jails being a stepping stone along the way. It's real innovation and why it won over alternatives was the tooling and infrastructure around the containers - particularly distributing them.
- bmitch3020 9mo ago
  You're missing image distribution, namespaces (networking, pids, mount, users), seccomp (to limit root powers), cgroups (to limit cpu and memory usage), and so much more. There's also Docker Hub with the official images they maintain. And the Desktop tooling makes an embedded Linux VM much easier to work with than spinning up your own VM, copying files around, and forwarding networking ports.
koe123 9mo ago
Honestly I reach for podman or `nix develop` any chance I get. What is the edge that docker provides these days?
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
  What is the edge that docker provides these days? Enterprise support and Docker Desktop makes it nearly seamless to get set up using containers. I've tried Rancher/podman/buildah and the experience introduced too much friction for me without being on a Linux system.
  - koe123 9mo ago
    Fair! I haven’t done any container related activities on Windows.
  - troyvit 9mo ago
    > [...] without being on a Linux system. I'll add that needing to be on the "right" Linux system is another strike against Podman. Last I checked if I wasn't on a RedHat derivative I was in the wilderness.
    - travisgriggs 9mo ago
      Huh. I tried docker. Didn’t like the odor of enshittification, and so switched to podman (desktop). I use it on macOS, and deploy on Ubuntu. It’s been smooth sailing. I found the signal to noise ratio better in Podland. As a newb to docker space, I was overwhelmed with should I swarm, should I compose, what’s this register my thing? And people are freaking about root stuff. I’m sure I still only use and understand about 10% of the pod(man) space, buts way better than how I felt in the docker space. I miss when software engineering put a high value on simplicity.
      - troyvit 9mo ago
        Yeah I was pretty hard on podman in that comment but the truth is I use it over docker wherever I can. I have a mixed environment at home but settled on RedHat for the home server and everything seems totally ok. I really like quadlets, and the ability to go rootless is a big load off my mind to be honest. I do wish they'd package it for other distros though. It would save some headaches.
thiagoperes 9mo ago
Switched to OrbStack in one prompt using Claude. It’s a night and day difference
- eigencoder 9mo ago
  What's better about it?
  - linkage 9mo ago
    The host actually gets RAM back after bursty workloads in the container thanks to memory ballooning. Containers also start up to 5x faster and `npm install` is also much faster because OrbStack uses macOS-specific APIs as much as possible.
    - chuckadams 9mo ago
      The Orbstack dashboard is also something you'll actually enjoy using. It's a native Swift app that launches instantly, not Electron. You get resolvable hostnames for all your containers (though I use traefik instead). Opening a container's filesystem in Finder is another nice trick, I use that one now and then.
  - calmoo 9mo ago
    For one, it has dynamic memory allocation and is much faster and resource efficient. Drop in replacement. It also has a rather nice UI,
- scoodah 9mo ago
  You needed Claude for a `brew install orbstack`?
JakaJancar 9mo ago
They enshittified/Dropboxified their core Docker Desktop app so much that OrbStack — I believe a single person initially — managed to build a better product. I love this outcome.
__MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
I used to be very enthusiastic about docker compose, but I've been playing around with nix + process-compose lately and its pretty great. I can have k3s and tilt in there only when it's necessary--which it's usually not.
- tuananh 9mo ago
  cool,, i have to check out process-compose.
  - __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
    It's pretty much just docker compose, but you don't have to forward ports or map volumes because the processes are not running in containers. The TUI is pretty nice also. If docker compose has an equivalent I'm not aware of it. Its especially nice for use with agents because the process-compose commands can be used to understand what's running, what's pending, what's failing, etc. Of course there's always `ps aux | grep` but that's full of noise from the rest of your system and it doesn't provide and structure for understanding: "foo is not running because the readiness check for bar is failing". Containers have their place, but I don't think it's everywhere.
- chuckadams 9mo ago
  Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?
  - gf000 9mo ago
    I may misunderstand your problem, but I just have a configuration repository for various "hosts". There are a couple of settings I share between them, and then just specify the differences. "Deploying" one is as simple as `nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#hostName`
PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
I was a contractor code money at a place automating $3M/yr in labor. We reported to a senior that did little programming if at all. He was older than me but newer than myself to the company, I was happy to avoid meetings and code. He'd always try to get us into various technologies, Docker was one of them. It wasn't really relevant for the job, but I could see its uses. Now that I think about it, I don't think anything they did on the tech discovery front was useful. Got stuck on Confulence which required us to save as a .pdf for our users to view lmao. Credit for being super smart with coding, he was a wiz on code reviews.
amelius 9mo ago
What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user, and that it keeps images between users in a database. I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.
- esafak 9mo ago
  https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/rootless_tutorial.md https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...
  - iberator 9mo ago
    It's hilarious. Your 'solution' to use docker without root is to make some system changes as root and then use/build docker LOL.
    - IshKebab 9mo ago
      Uhm no. Podman is a different product that is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Docker but lets you run as non-root. You have to be root to set it up, but after that you don't need any special privileges. With Docker the only option is to basically give everyone root access. It's true that it requires root for some setup though. Unclear if op was complaining about that.
      - cpuguy83 9mo ago
        Docker can run rootless the same way podman does.
        FireBeyond 9mo ago
        Now. I was at Red Hat at the time, in the BU that built podman, and Docker was just largely refusing any of Red Hat's patches around rootless operation, and this was one of the top 3, if not the top motivation for Red Hat spinning up podman.
Moto7451 9mo ago
One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this. At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a sort of “gotcha” scheme where if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard, we had a few people on a new enough version that it would trigger the new license terms and we were in violation. They didn’t seem to do much outreach other than threatening us. So in each case we switched to Rancher Desktop. The licensing cost wasn’t that high, but it was hard to take them in good faith after their approach.
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
  Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard You didn't have a device management system or similar product managing software installs (SCCM in Windows land)? That's table stakes for any admin.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    Device management != micromanaging developer workflow. At my midsize company, our engineers could absolutely say something like “we don’t like Terraform Cloud, we want to switch to OpenTofu and env0” and our management would be okay with it and make it happen as long as we justify the change. We wouldn’t even really have to ask permission if the change was no cost.
    - ajcp 9mo ago
      -> and make it happen. I think OPs point is they failed on this part. "Making it happen" should have been ensuring a compliant and approved version of the software was the one made available to the developers. At a large scale that is done via device management, but even at a medium sized enterprise that should have been done via a source management portal of some sort.
rmccue 9mo ago
> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit Strongly disagree. The core Docker technology was an excellent product and as the article says, had a massive impact on the industry. But they never found a market for that technology at any price point that wasn't ~free, so they didn't have PMF. That technology also only took off in the way it did because it was free and open source.
- LtWorf 9mo ago
  The entire technology is a wrapper on setns().
  - airstrike 9mo ago
    And Dropbox is just curlftpfs
    - llbbdd 9mo ago
      The whole computer is a wrapper around electricity
      - ronsor 9mo ago
        And humans are just a wrapper around oxygen, food, and water.
        hashstring 9mo ago
        That’s just a wrapper around quarks for the most part…
        MikeNotThePope 9mo ago
        I personally identify as a quark-gluon plasma held together by the strong force and a sheer lack a boundaries.
      - 9mo ago
mg794613 9mo ago
"The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value." No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own products. "Docker Swarm was Docker’s attempt to compete with Kubernetes in the orchestration space." No, it never was intended like that. That some people build infra/business around it is something completely different, but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender. "If you’re giving away your security features for free, what are you selling?" This, is what actually is going to cost their business, I'm extremely grateful for what they have done for us. But they didn't gave themselves a chance. Their behaviour has been more akin to a non-profit. Great for us, not so great for them in the long run.
- dralley 9mo ago
  It didn't help them that they rejected the traditionally successful ways of monetizing open source software. Which is, selling support contracts to large corporate users. Corporate customers didn't like the security implications of the Docker daemon running as root, they wanted better sandboxing and management (cgroups v2), wanted to be able to run their own internal registries, didn't want to have docker trying to fight with systemd, etc. Docker was not interested (in the early years) in adopting cgroups v2 or daemonless / rootless operation, and they wanted everyone to pay to use Dockerhub on the public internet rather than running their own internal registries, so docker-cli didn't support alternate registries for a long long time. And it seemed like they disliked systemd for "ideological" reasons to an extent that they didn't make much effort to resolve the problems that would crop up between docker and systemd. Because Docker didn't want to build the product that corporate customers wanted to use, and didn't accept patches when Red Hat tried to get them implemented those features themselves, eventually Red Hat just went out and built up Podman, Quay, and the entire ecosystem of tooling that those corporate customers wanted themselves (and sold it to them). That was a bit of an own goal.
  - Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
OptionOfT 9mo ago
I just want to disable "Ask Gordon" in the sidebar. I don't want to see it. My brain works in weird ways. Whenever I see a name for the first time I attach that person to it. Gordon is the character from Half Life. Docker a piece of software. Don't anthropomorphize it.
- gordonhart 9mo ago
  Eventually there will be enough anthropomorphized pieces of software for everybody to have their "Alexa" moment. Mine came last year (thanks, Docker).
- Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
  Gordon was the office pet tortoise if I recall, and might still be around given they may live a very long time. Thus it became the default user in parts of their software. =3
  - bmitch3020 9mo ago
    Gordon unfortunately passed away in 2023: https://x.com/solomonstre/status/1637537983988629504 https://x.com/solomonstre/status/1637537983988629504
    - Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
      In a way, it is fun the memory still affects design choices. =3
lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
My favorite thing about Docker is that it spawned Podman.
outcoldman 9mo ago
If somebody missed it, apple/container is a good replacement for Docker for Mac on macOS. I have been using it for the last 6 months, there are issues, but also team is actively developing it. https://github.com/apple/container https://github.com/apple/container
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Does that let you build images on a macOS host that works on Windows and Linux too? It doesn't seem to talk about what platform the images support, only where you could run containers.
  - outcoldman 9mo ago
    Not sure about Windows, but yes to Linux. It runs linux containers (not darwin), plus can have rosetta. And I build multi arch images (arm64/amd64). It uses buildkit, the same Docker uses, so I am sure you can build Windows containers with it as well. Just a note, I am working for the org, that sells enterprise software shipped as container images, publishes on Docker Hub and RedHat. No issues migrating to apple/container.
- pawelduda 9mo ago
  How is the performance overhead of this compared to docker on MacOS?
  - outcoldman 9mo ago
    The only big noticeable issue for me was building a large enterprise images (like Splunk). This issue was fixed [1]. Other than that I have not seen any issues with IO or performance. Running Splunk/OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, some performance tests, enterprise software written in Go (building for arm64/amd64). No issues at all. 1. https://github.com/apple/container/issues/68 https://github.com/apple/container/issues/68
- cpuguy83 9mo ago
  I haven't personally used it, but containerd also has "nerdbox": http://github.com/containerd/nerdbox http://github.com/containerd/nerdbox
Havoc 9mo ago
Reminds me a bit of stuff like curl - the importance of it and the monetization opportunities are out of sync. Tricky
- justonceokay 9mo ago
  I’m currently building a micro transaction version of `ls`
  - Loeffelmann 9mo ago
    An AI version of ls and fzf bringing your file system to the AI age
  - yomismoaqui 9mo ago
    https://www.ycombinator.com/apply https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
    - Havoc 9mo ago
      Not a charity - they’re going to want to see a viable eventual monetization path too
      - Macha 9mo ago
        Pretty sure that was meant to be a jab (mostly at YC) rather than a serious suggestion
        Havoc 9mo ago
        Ah right. Very plausible
godzillabrennus 9mo ago
I switched to Podman on Windows and found it less laggy, and it works fine for local development. I'm sure I'm missing some features, but as Docker continues to struggle to generate revenue, the open-source option will be important to an increasingly large part of the industry. FYI- If I was docker, I'd stand up some bare metal hosting (i.e., a Docker Cloud) designed around making it easier for novice developers to take containers and turn them into web applications, with a product similar to Supabase built around this cloud to let novice developers quickly prototype and launch apps without learning how to do deployments in more sophisticated clouds. Supabase and AI vibe coders pair well, but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve. It keeps many vibe coders trapped in AIO vibe coding platforms like Lovable and AI Studio.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve Is it really a hole? I'm not the target user, but I keep coming across "Build & deploy your own platform/service/application with VibeCodingLikeThereIsNoTomorrow" and similar, maybe new one every week or so.
  - godzillabrennus 9mo ago
    Seems like its a hole in the market if new services are cropping up. If there wasn't a hole then established clouds would have this. I don't have to think if I want a virtual machine booted with Ubuntu. I can do that in any cloud. How many have vibe coding support to launch containers that work locally in a cloud so they are accessible as a website? How many of those have a build process that does security checks and helps patch the code and automates building browser tests to verify the functionality keeps working (or kicks it back to the coding agent to fix)? Basically, the last 10% of the vibe coding a web app locally that isn't automated. This is a big opportunity for a semi established vendor like Docker that a startup would need users and capital (for bare metal) to fix. Two things that a Docker has at their disposal.
radioradioradio 9mo ago
Seems like (according to the author) whatever docker is doing it is a sign of their immediate demise and everyone on HN is cheering for the company to go down in flames no matter what. The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem? Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they just stay stagnant? Has made hardened images free instead of making that a premium feature only for people in banks? - and monitising SLAs, how is that a problem? Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using, but apparently at the same time Docker is deeply irrelevant and should not make money - while all of us on HN with well paid tech jobs get to have high thoughts on their every move to pay their employees and investors...
- amluto 9mo ago
  > Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman Podman? Podman appears to have reimplemented basically everything. What runtime are you talking about?
  - JCattheATM 9mo ago
    Hub.
    - amluto 9mo ago
      What do you mean? There is a website called Docker Hub. There is a competing product, affiliated with Podman, called Quay, which is also a website and an on-prem solution that I think you can pay for and also an open-source product: https://github.com/quay/quay https://github.com/quay/quay
      - JCattheATM 9mo ago
        > There is a competing product, affiliated with Podman, called Quay Most stuff is not published on Quay; most podman users use Docker Hub or Compose files.
skwashd 9mo ago
A few times I've wondered, where would Docker Inc be today if Microsoft acquired them back in 2017? Early 2017 was peak Docker and Docker Inc. Those were the days. Container hype was everywhere. Before moby. Before all the pivots. Microsoft was embracing open source and the cloud. They were acquiring dev tools. It was a missed opportunity for both companies.
- eigencoder 9mo ago
  I don't want Microsoft's fingers all over docker -- if anything that would have accelerated the rise of e.g. podman
- hamdingers 9mo ago
  They probably would've kept autobuilds free for open source and I wouldn't have switched to GHCR and Github Actions for all my projects. Seems Microsoft got my "business" anyway.
jrm4 9mo ago
I think this deserves a reframing: Docker is perhaps the greatest success story involving a massively invested tech company. We got an amazing durable essential piece of software from someone investing billions of dollars. Now, the fact that they didn't get their money back, well, who cares? Not me, it wasn't my money. Sucks for them, maybe -- but that's far better than enshittification for everyone.
bmitch3020 9mo ago
Another year, another story written about the demise of Docker. This has been happening since before Kubernetes took off. My own take: Docker had a choice of markets to go after, the enterprise market was being dominated by the hyperscalers pushing their own Kubernetes offerings. So they pivoted to focus on the developer tooling market. This is a hard market to make work, particularly since developers are very famous for not paying for tooling, but they appear to making a profit. With Docker Hub, it's always been a challenge to limit how much that costs to run. And with more stuff being thrown in larger images, I don't want to see that monthly bill. The limits they added hurt, but also made a lot of people realize they should have been running their own mirror on-prem, if not only to better handle an upstream outage when us-east-1 has a bad day. Everything else has been pushing into each of the various popular development markets, from AI, to offloading builds to the cloud, to Hardened Images. They release things for free when they need to keep up with the competition, and charge when enterprises will pay for it. They've shifted their focus a lot over the years. My fear would be if they stayed stagnant, trying to extract rents without pushing into new offerings. So I'm not worried they'll fail this year, just like I wasn't worried any of the previous years when similar posts were made.
drnick1 9mo ago
Why should a company be making money selling what is a essentially a thin layer of convenience over kernel features?
shykes 9mo ago
Hi, I'm the founder of Docker. I started it in 2008 (under the name Dotcloud) and left in 2018. AMA.
- jiehong 9mo ago
  What would you have done differently in retrospect?
  - shykes 9mo ago
    What I would tell my younger self: Only listen to your users and customers, ignore everyone else. Don't hire an external CEO unless you're ready to leave. Hiring a CEO will not fix the loneliness of not having a co-founder. Having haters is part of success. Accept it, and try to not let it get to you. Don't partner with Red Hat. They are competitors even though they're not honest about it. Not everyone hates you even though it may seem that way on hacker news and twitter. People actually appreciate your work and it will get better. Keep going.
- McP 9mo ago
  What are your thoughts on Podman?
  - shykes 9mo ago
    Imitation is the highest form of flattery! Obviously there was demand for an alternative to Docker that was native to the Red Hat platform. We couldn't offer that (although we tried in the early days) so it made sense that they would. In the early days we tried very hard to accommodate their needs, for example by implementing support for devicemapper as an alternative to aufs. I remember spending many hours in their Boston office whiteboarding solutions. But we soon realized our priorities were fundamentally at odds: they cared most about platform lock-in, and we cared most about platform independence. There was also a cultural issue: when Red Hat contributes to open source it's always from a position of strength. If a project is important to them, they need merge authority - they simply don't know how to meaningfully contribute to an upstream project when they're not in charge. Because of the diverging design priorities, they never earned true merge rights on the repo: they had to argue for their pull requests like everyone else, and input from maintainers was not optional. Many pull requests were never merged because of fundamental design issues, like breaking compatibility with non-Red Hat platforms. Others because of subjective architecture disagreements. They really didn't like that, which led to all sorts of drama and bad behavior. In the process I lost respect for a company I once admired. I also think they made a mistake marketing podman as a drop-in replacement to Docker. This promise of compatibility limited their design freedom and I'm sure caused the maintainers a lot of headaches- compatibility is hard! Ultimately the true priority of podman - native integration with the Red Hat platform - makes it impossible for it to overtake Docker. I'm sure some of the podman authors would like to jettison that constraint, but I don't think that's structurally possible. Red Hat will never invest in a project that doesn't contribute to their platform lock-in. Back when RH was a dominant platform, that was a strength. Nowadays it is a hindrance.
blackcatsec 9mo ago
I truly do sometimes detest the open source community's often outright hostility towards monetization of software. People gotta eat.
- onraglanroad 9mo ago
  I've been to developer conferences in the US. Lack of food is definitely not a problem.
  - jujube3 9mo ago
    He shoots, he scores!
- shortsunblack 9mo ago
  Open source community detests dilettante attempts at rent seeking by building mediocre wrappers over commodity software. Docker did not invent Linux containers. They did not invent namespaces or chroots. You'll be hard pressed to name the things they did invent and those things have long ago left Docker to hang dry (OCI imagespec). OrbStack is built by a single person and it provides an objectively better experience than Docker Desktop, built presumably by dozens of full time engineers. People detest incompetence and rent seeking. That they do. The lack of important contributions of Docker can be best summarized by all the alternatives that popped up in no time. With Kubernetes now defaulting to CRI-O, modern container stack has precisely zero Dockerisms.
singularity2001 9mo ago
Superfluous!
shermantanktop 9mo ago
New cool tech is almost never a moat. It will get a company started but if the tech has any success, that success is always replicable (even if the exact tech isn’t). IP protection is worthless and beside the point. The only moat is the creativity of a company’s core staff when they spend a lot of time on valuable problems. Each thing they produce will grow, live, and die, but if the company has no pipeline it is doomed. And VCs know this, which is why they want to pump startups up, and then cash out before they flop, even while founders talk about all the great things they can do next. Naming your company after your one successful product is a pretty good sign of a limited lifespan.
neom 9mo ago
I think what happened to docker is a bit unfortunate. March 2013 — Docker goes public/open source at PyCon Nov 2013 — Jerry Chen pursues Docker, leads to Greylock Series B - Jan 2014 — Greylock Series B closes ($15M) - June 2014 — Kubernetes announced - July 2015 — Kubernetes 1.0 released. Jerry is a good friend of mine and I think a great VC, he comes from the VMware world and was part of building the VMware enterprise strategy. When all the container stuff was all going down, I was trying to understand how digialocean needed to play in the container space - so I spent a lot of time talking to people and trying to understand it (decided we basically...shouldn't, although looked at buying Hashi) - but it was clear at the time the docker team went with Jerry because they saw themselves either displacing VMware or doing a VMware style play - either way, we all watched them start the process of moving to a real enterprise footing out of just a pure play devtool in 2014, it might have worked too (although frankly their GTM motions were very very strange), but Kubernetes..yah. You might recall Flo was on the scene too selling his ideas at Mesosphere, and the wonderful Alex Polvi with CoreOS. It was certainly an interesting time, I think about that period often and that it is a bit of a shame what happened to docker. I like Solomon a lot and think he's a genuinely genius dude.
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
> For developers, this doesn’t change much. Docker containers will continue to work, and the open source nature of Docker means the technology will persist regardless of what happens to the company. But it’s worth watching how Docker Inc’s search for identity plays out - it could affect the ecosystem of tools and services built around containers. Things will actually change quite a bit. First of all, millions of people depend on Docker Desktop, and Podman Desktop is (as everything from RedHat is) a poor replacement for it. And the Docker CLI and daemon power a huge amount of container technology; Podman is, again, quite a poor replacement. If these solutions go away, a large amount of business and technology is gonna get left in the lurch. Second, most of the containerized world depends on Docker Hub. If that went away, actually a huge swath of businesses would just go hard-down, with no easy fix. I know a million HNers will be crying out about the evils of "centralization", but actually the issue is it's corporate-run rather than an open body. The architecture should have had mirrors built-in from the start, but even without mirrors, the company and all its investment and support going away is the bigger rug-pull. The industry and ecosystem have this terribly human habit of rushing at the path-of-least-resistance. If we don't plan an intelligent, robust migration strategy away from Docker, we'll end up relying on something worse.
- forty 9mo ago
  Why do you say podman is a poor replacement? It has been consistently a better replacement for me on Linux, with easy rootless, daemon less, quadlet, etc. And at work where I have to use macos, it works just as well.
  - Spivak 9mo ago
    Yeah, people are sleeping on Podman who is now genuinely leading the space now that docker-engine is all but in maintenance mode. Quadlets are amazing and greatly simplify the deployment and management of containers. The systemd integration is so good because you have this battle tested process manager with a gazillion features and you can use them with your containers for free. Podman can run pods, hence the name, which is an abstraction that k8s has proven is useful but docker completely lacks. Podman pushing k8s manifests as an (imho better) compose with podman play is refreshing. And it can be dropped in with Quadlets too. Podman can generate your k8s manifests from your running containers. Get everything running how you like and save. buildah frees you from Dockerfile and lets you build containers completely rootlesslessly.
ynx 9mo ago
> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit - they created the containerization standard that everyone uses. The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value. I would argue the reverse: that Docker's value was itself the product-market fit. Docker the technology was commoditized and open-source almost from its genesis, because its technology had been built by Borg engineers at Google. It provided marginally more than ergonomics, but ergonomics was all it needed - the missing link between theory and practice.
- Conan_Kudo 9mo ago
  Well, technically the technology was originally built by IBM folks, as that's where LXC came from. But otherwise yes, your point makes sense.
  - shykes 9mo ago
    Google developed linux cgroups. IBM developed linux namespaces. Docker developed a completely new application runtime and delivery system, built on cgroups, namespaces, aufs, and tar. This required lots of original design and engineering work. Prior to Docker, there was no runtime contract for distinguishing the portable application bits from the non-portable host-specific bits. You just got a machine, and then had to provision, configure and templatize it - then upload application bits into it yourself. All three companies contributed significantly to the modern container stack. As the co-founder of Docker, and someone who spent 10 years toiling away at container technology before it finally became cool, I wish people had more appreciation for the amount of engineering and design work that went into that. Google and IBM contributed the primitives that made Docker possible. But Docker made genuine contributions of its own.
mystraline 9mo ago
Admittedly, on my infrastructure, Ive been de-dockerizing. Theres too many footguns and little gotchas, and they all add up. For example, sharing a graphics card, say a Intel A380 and Jellyfin, over docker is a TERRIBLE experience. But the same, with a full VM, and the gfx card shared to it is easy peasy. Now, for testing applications, docker is great. But when I decide to run a service, I'll de-dockerize OR single VM with docker inside, with cronjobs to once a week update. And logging/monitoring is also a hell of a lot easier per machine, rather than 8 services through docker. I'm sure if I need a full dynamic service fabric, sure go with Docker or K8s. But this is for personal and friend usage.
sneak 9mo ago
Docker is only successful because of free software: the foss docker daemon, the foss docker cli client, and of course linux. Docker tried to become a proprietary software company, which is rude and user-hostile.
ragall 9mo ago
It's a good thing that the commons are cheap. Imagine where we would be if all electrical devices were still covered by patents related to electricity, all owned by one company.
0hw0t 9mo ago
It's a config DSL for a config DSL (OS files). Docker isn't much different from an AI wrapper. What was this mighty corporate machine supposed to become shipping config scripts? The team I was before Docker got popular just used the OG container, user accounts, and set up namespaces and cgroups per user. Docker represents perfectly the issue with the software industry; it is software that duplicates existing software chasing "line go up" not actual utility. No net new utility just different semantics to perform sys admin work. Developers did not want to learn sys admin, and instead learned a meta-Docker-driven-sysadmin anyway.
jesse_dot_id 9mo ago
We use swarm in production and love it. K8s is extreme overkill for a high percentage of most of the shops who are using it, in my estimation.
wcallahan 9mo ago
I suspect the timing of this and comments is not coincidental. I pay for Docker licenses, even though not meeting the criteria for business size requiring it, as I wanted reliable image fetching for my self hosted container CI/CD pipelines failing docker hub image fetches. But as of now, my oAuth logins to Docker expire within hours now, and I’ve been left with no choice but to scatter in search of diffuse container image alternative sources for my Dockerfiles to stop this madness. My one way permanent migration from Docker Hub sourced images has finally left me with no reason to keep paying for Docker licenses due to whatever this misguided or blundered rate limit implementation is.
vegabook 9mo ago
It's become what happens when others learn your simple card trick.
kordlessagain 9mo ago
I use it with this every day: https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/codex-container https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/codex-container Docker is useful and it’s too bad early and ignorant investors poisoned the well. Their new AI stuff is bad but maybe if they positioned themselves like Ollama….
jaynamburi 9mo ago
Docker started as a simple, opinionated UX around Linux containers and became a product company wrapping an ecosystem that moved on without it. The original breakthrough wasn’t containers themselves (LXC already existed), but the combination of: a reproducible image format, layered filesystem semantics, a simple CLI, and a registry model that made distribution trivial. That unlocked a whole workflow shift. What happened next is that Docker the company tried to own the platform, while the industry standardized around the parts that mattered. The runtime split into containerd/runc, orchestration moved to Kubernetes, image specs went to OCI, and “Docker” became more of a developer UX brand than a core infrastructure primitive. Today Docker mostly means: A local dev environment (Docker Desktop) A build UX (Dockerfile, buildx) A compatibility layer over containerd A commercial product with licensing constraints Meanwhile, production container infrastructure largely bypasses Docker entirely. That’s not failure it’s a common arc. Docker succeeded so well that it got standardized out of the critical path. What remains is a polished on ramp for developers, not the foundation of the container ecosystem. In other words: Docker won the mindshare, lost the control, and pivoted to selling convenience.
- subsection1h 9mo ago
  All of the comments posted by the HN account named jaynamburi were written using an AI. Gemini confirms this: "Based on an analysis of the comments on the profile you linked, it is highly likely that they are written by an AI (or a human heavily using an LLM to generate responses)."
VLM 9mo ago
The key business mistake is trying to have too large of a company or having the wrong organization structure. Consider how a SCM like git or bitkeeper is more complicated than a wrapper for LXC. For some odd reason Docker has almost 100x as many employees as bitkeeper. They're just too big. It would be like trying to create a startup of "/bin/ls as a service" with at least 50 employees and 49 of them would not be able to generate enough revenue to break even much less turn into a billion dollar "LSaaS" tech unicorn. There's not enough meat for the pack. FreeBSD has jails and all of FreeBSD (not just jails, the whole thing) is about a third the size of Docker... hmm. An alternative to having an appropriate sized company would be giving up on profit. There probably is no way to make "real" money doing what Docker is doing, not "real" in the context of 1500+ employees. It would be very real if they could get their current revenue with 20 employees, but ... That is not bad, that just means they're better off as an IRS 501(c)(3) approved charity rather than trying to become a startup unicorn. Large organizations like the Red Cross are a valuable and important addition to the community, despite not being a successful tech unicorn. They got a lot of money from In-Q-Tel so they're already kind of taxpayer funded (via CIA) so going outright charity wouldn't be a stretch. A good business analogy for Docker would be the small day care my kids attended. They were based in a small church building which permanently limited the size of their state license. It doesn't matter if they hire 3 caregivers or 1500, they only have space for an 8 kid license and revenue will never exceed 8 kids. They can hire 1500 caregivers using VC funds but they'll never get more than 8 kids of revenue. They are not working in a field where they can scale to a billion dollars of revenue. There's nothing "wrong" about a daycare that rents a room of a church, employs a couple "early childhood education major" college grads right around minimum wage, and the kids have fun. Thats Docker. There is perhaps a bigger third problem that they probably sold themselves to investors as an unstoppable money printing machine. Whoops. Nobody makes that mistake with the local church daycare. To some extent lack of due diligence is the fault of the investors. We'd never have had docker without their ... selfless financial donation.

262 points by tuananh 9mo ago

For a while, Docker seemed to focus on developer experience. ahh yes, docker desktop, where the error messages are "something went wrong", and the primary debugging step is to wipe it, uninstall, and reinstall.

reedf1 9mo ago
It is honestly incredible that such an important part of the Windows dev process is nearly unusable. It is easily the most fickle and opaque bit of software that I am required to depend upon.
- hu3 9mo ago
  Yep. I used to have a ton of problems with Docker in Windows. It has been a year without problems since I enabled WSL2 engine for Docker. Honestly they should make the WSL2 Docker engine mandatory because otherwise things barely work.
  - tuananh 9mo ago
    at work, i opted for remote development workspace because of this problem. Windows & Docker ain't meant to be together :(
  - bonesss 9mo ago
    Docker on Windows issues, back before WSL had matured enough, gave a pretty compelling argument for doing windows development on OSX inside a VM.
- throw20251220 9mo ago
  Windows is the problem, not Docker. Just try wsl2 and you’ll see…
  - breakingcups 9mo ago
    That's a very naive take. The issue is Docker Desktop, a buggy mess. I have plenty of well-functioning, complex Windows applications with detailed troubleshooting utilities.
    - throw20251220 9mo ago
      Yeah, it's all naive when it doesn't work for you. It's naive using Windows.
FireBeyond 9mo ago
Yup. How many years did I go where the most frequently pushed button in the Docker Desktop UI was "reset my installation"?

leetrout 9mo ago

> Docker created a standard so successful that it became infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to monetize Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. Old school robotics players have a playbook for this. You may or may not agree DBs are infra but Oracle has done well by capitalistic standards. The reality is in our economy exploitation is a basic requirement. Nothing says a company providing porcelain for Linux kernel capabilities has a right to exist. What has turned into OCI is great. Docker desktop lost on Mac to Orb stack and friends (but I guess they have caught back up?) the article does make it clear they have tried hard to find a place to leverage rent and it probably is making enough for a 10-100 person company to be very comfortable but 500-1000 seems very over grown at this point. Really should not have given up on Swarm just to come back to it. Kubernetes is over kill for so many people using it for a convenient deployment story.

fragmede 9mo ago
> Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. But not impossible. Terraform seems to have paid its creator quite well.
- tuananh 9mo ago
  I think Hashicorp got out just in time. They are declining in recent years.
  - chuckadams 9mo ago
    They're IBM now, I think they just consider you and me beneath their notice. I guess some things never change.
  - b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
    They are stagnant and their dev experience is very poor.
echelon 9mo ago
The "Fair Source" [1] and "Fair Code" [2] licenses are sustainable and user-friendly. Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology. Imagine if Redis, Elastic, and so many other technologies could. Modern database companies will typically dual license their work so they don't have their lunch eaten. I've done it for some of my own work [3]. You want your customers to have freedom, but you don't want massive companies coming in and ripping you off. You'd also like to provide a "easy path" for payments that sustain the engineering, but not require your users to be bound to you. "OSI-approved" Open Source is an industry co-opt of labor. Amazon and Google benefit immensely with an ecosystem of things they can offer, but they in turn give you zero of the AWS/GCP code base. Hyperscalers are miles of crust around an open source interior. They charge and make millions off of the free labor of open source. I think we need a new type of license that requires that the companies using the license must make their entire operational codebases available. [1] https://fair.io/licenses/ https://fair.io/licenses/ [2] https://faircode.io/ https://faircode.io/ [3] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft/blob/main/LICENSE.md https://github.com/storytold/artcraft/blob/main/LICENSE.md

vivzkestrel 9mo ago

- well time to announce DockerVM, a super fast under 100ms boot time competitor to firecracker and gvisor and try selling this to some of the cloud providers out there - take advantage of the current agentic wave and announce a Docker Sandbox runner product that lets you run agents inside cloud sandboxes

pploug 9mo ago
https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/ https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/
- vivzkestrel 9mo ago
  I was not aware of this one but I am talking about running it on the cloud like making a direct competitor to modal
jiehong 9mo ago
Or maybe a CI runner service?

whinvik 9mo ago

Sorry off topic question but has Docker come up with a easy to use dev solution. I always end up with using Devcontainer: it solves the sandboxed, ready to use dev env. But the actual experience with developing on VSCode with Dev Containers is not great. It's laggy and slow.

wilsonpa 9mo ago
Really? I work across multiple vscode projects (locally), some use dev-containers and others don't. I have never noticed any difference in experience across the two. I have also used them remotely (ssh and using tailscale) and noticed a little lag, but nothing really distracting.
- amonith 9mo ago
  Most likely a Windows or MacOS user, where docker runs in a linux VM. Optimized as much as possible and lightweight, but still a VM.
  - okanat 9mo ago
    No, on Windows it is very quick too. On WSL2 compiling Rust programs are almost as fast as Linux on bare metal. However the files need to live inside the Linux filesystem. Sharing with Windows drives actually compiles slower than native Windows.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      You can use dev drives instead, I guess.
      - okanat 9mo ago
        If you are building natively, yes. However the original comment is about Dev Containers which runs under WSL2. If you open a native Windows folder in VSCode and activate the Dev Container, it will use the special drvfs mounts that communicate via Plan9 to host Windows OS to access native Windows files from the Docker distro. Since it is a network layer accross two kernels, it is slow as hell.

zoobab 9mo ago

Who wants to pay for chroot?

c0n5pir4cy 9mo ago
Ah - the old magic. There is a lot more than a simple chroot to Docker though - with FreeBSD Jails being a stepping stone along the way. It's real innovation and why it won over alternatives was the tooling and infrastructure around the containers - particularly distributing them.
bmitch3020 9mo ago
You're missing image distribution, namespaces (networking, pids, mount, users), seccomp (to limit root powers), cgroups (to limit cpu and memory usage), and so much more. There's also Docker Hub with the official images they maintain. And the Desktop tooling makes an embedded Linux VM much easier to work with than spinning up your own VM, copying files around, and forwarding networking ports.

koe123 9mo ago

Honestly I reach for podman or `nix develop` any chance I get. What is the edge that docker provides these days?

b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
What is the edge that docker provides these days? Enterprise support and Docker Desktop makes it nearly seamless to get set up using containers. I've tried Rancher/podman/buildah and the experience introduced too much friction for me without being on a Linux system.
- koe123 9mo ago
  Fair! I haven’t done any container related activities on Windows.
- troyvit 9mo ago
  > [...] without being on a Linux system. I'll add that needing to be on the "right" Linux system is another strike against Podman. Last I checked if I wasn't on a RedHat derivative I was in the wilderness.
  - travisgriggs 9mo ago
    Huh. I tried docker. Didn’t like the odor of enshittification, and so switched to podman (desktop). I use it on macOS, and deploy on Ubuntu. It’s been smooth sailing. I found the signal to noise ratio better in Podland. As a newb to docker space, I was overwhelmed with should I swarm, should I compose, what’s this register my thing? And people are freaking about root stuff. I’m sure I still only use and understand about 10% of the pod(man) space, buts way better than how I felt in the docker space. I miss when software engineering put a high value on simplicity.
    - troyvit 9mo ago
      Yeah I was pretty hard on podman in that comment but the truth is I use it over docker wherever I can. I have a mixed environment at home but settled on RedHat for the home server and everything seems totally ok. I really like quadlets, and the ability to go rootless is a big load off my mind to be honest. I do wish they'd package it for other distros though. It would save some headaches.

thiagoperes 9mo ago

Switched to OrbStack in one prompt using Claude. It’s a night and day difference

eigencoder 9mo ago
What's better about it?
- linkage 9mo ago
  The host actually gets RAM back after bursty workloads in the container thanks to memory ballooning. Containers also start up to 5x faster and `npm install` is also much faster because OrbStack uses macOS-specific APIs as much as possible.
  - chuckadams 9mo ago
    The Orbstack dashboard is also something you'll actually enjoy using. It's a native Swift app that launches instantly, not Electron. You get resolvable hostnames for all your containers (though I use traefik instead). Opening a container's filesystem in Finder is another nice trick, I use that one now and then.
- calmoo 9mo ago
  For one, it has dynamic memory allocation and is much faster and resource efficient. Drop in replacement. It also has a rather nice UI,
scoodah 9mo ago
You needed Claude for a `brew install orbstack`?

JakaJancar 9mo ago

They enshittified/Dropboxified their core Docker Desktop app so much that OrbStack — I believe a single person initially — managed to build a better product. I love this outcome.

__MatrixMan__ 9mo ago

I used to be very enthusiastic about docker compose, but I've been playing around with nix + process-compose lately and its pretty great. I can have k3s and tilt in there only when it's necessary--which it's usually not.

tuananh 9mo ago
cool,, i have to check out process-compose.
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
  It's pretty much just docker compose, but you don't have to forward ports or map volumes because the processes are not running in containers. The TUI is pretty nice also. If docker compose has an equivalent I'm not aware of it. Its especially nice for use with agents because the process-compose commands can be used to understand what's running, what's pending, what's failing, etc. Of course there's always `ps aux | grep` but that's full of noise from the rest of your system and it doesn't provide and structure for understanding: "foo is not running because the readiness check for bar is failing". Containers have their place, but I don't think it's everywhere.
chuckadams 9mo ago
Nix is wonderful for reproducible and declarative infrastructure, but how do you manage multiple server instances with it? I have a handful of projects active at any time, and am currently running four web servers, three mysql instances, two postgres, and a partridge in a pear tree. Should I run Nix in Docker, Docker from Nix, or is there a nix-only solution for this?
- gf000 9mo ago
  I may misunderstand your problem, but I just have a configuration repository for various "hosts". There are a couple of settings I share between them, and then just specify the differences. "Deploying" one is as simple as `nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#hostName`

PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago

I was a contractor code money at a place automating $3M/yr in labor. We reported to a senior that did little programming if at all. He was older than me but newer than myself to the company, I was happy to avoid meetings and code. He'd always try to get us into various technologies, Docker was one of them. It wasn't really relevant for the job, but I could see its uses. Now that I think about it, I don't think anything they did on the tech discovery front was useful. Got stuck on Confulence which required us to save as a .pdf for our users to view lmao. Credit for being super smart with coding, he was a wiz on code reviews.

amelius 9mo ago

What I hate about docker and other such solutions is that I cannot install it as nonroot user, and that it keeps images between users in a database. I want to move things around using mv and cp, and not have another management layer that I need to be aware of and that can end up in an inconsistent state.

esafak 9mo ago
https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/rootless_tutorial.md https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorial...
- iberator 9mo ago
  It's hilarious. Your 'solution' to use docker without root is to make some system changes as root and then use/build docker LOL.
  - IshKebab 9mo ago
    Uhm no. Podman is a different product that is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Docker but lets you run as non-root. You have to be root to set it up, but after that you don't need any special privileges. With Docker the only option is to basically give everyone root access. It's true that it requires root for some setup though. Unclear if op was complaining about that.
    - cpuguy83 9mo ago
      Docker can run rootless the same way podman does.
      - FireBeyond 9mo ago
        Now. I was at Red Hat at the time, in the BU that built podman, and Docker was just largely refusing any of Red Hat's patches around rootless operation, and this was one of the top 3, if not the top motivation for Red Hat spinning up podman.

Moto7451 9mo ago

One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this. At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a sort of “gotcha” scheme where if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard, we had a few people on a new enough version that it would trigger the new license terms and we were in violation. They didn’t seem to do much outreach other than threatening us. So in each case we switched to Rancher Desktop. The licensing cost wasn’t that high, but it was hard to take them in good faith after their approach.

b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard You didn't have a device management system or similar product managing software installs (SCCM in Windows land)? That's table stakes for any admin.
- dangus 9mo ago
  Device management != micromanaging developer workflow. At my midsize company, our engineers could absolutely say something like “we don’t like Terraform Cloud, we want to switch to OpenTofu and env0” and our management would be okay with it and make it happen as long as we justify the change. We wouldn’t even really have to ask permission if the change was no cost.
  - ajcp 9mo ago
    -> and make it happen. I think OPs point is they failed on this part. "Making it happen" should have been ensuring a compliant and approved version of the software was the one made available to the developers. At a large scale that is done via device management, but even at a medium sized enterprise that should have been done via a source management portal of some sort.

rmccue 9mo ago

> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit Strongly disagree. The core Docker technology was an excellent product and as the article says, had a massive impact on the industry. But they never found a market for that technology at any price point that wasn't ~free, so they didn't have PMF. That technology also only took off in the way it did because it was free and open source.

LtWorf 9mo ago
The entire technology is a wrapper on setns().
- airstrike 9mo ago
  And Dropbox is just curlftpfs
  - llbbdd 9mo ago
    The whole computer is a wrapper around electricity
    - ronsor 9mo ago
      And humans are just a wrapper around oxygen, food, and water.
      - hashstring 9mo ago
        That’s just a wrapper around quarks for the most part…
        MikeNotThePope 9mo ago
        I personally identify as a quark-gluon plasma held together by the strong force and a sheer lack a boundaries.
    - 9mo ago

mg794613 9mo ago

"The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value." No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own products. "Docker Swarm was Docker’s attempt to compete with Kubernetes in the orchestration space." No, it never was intended like that. That some people build infra/business around it is something completely different, but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender. "If you’re giving away your security features for free, what are you selling?" This, is what actually is going to cost their business, I'm extremely grateful for what they have done for us. But they didn't gave themselves a chance. Their behaviour has been more akin to a non-profit. Great for us, not so great for them in the long run.

dralley 9mo ago
It didn't help them that they rejected the traditionally successful ways of monetizing open source software. Which is, selling support contracts to large corporate users. Corporate customers didn't like the security implications of the Docker daemon running as root, they wanted better sandboxing and management (cgroups v2), wanted to be able to run their own internal registries, didn't want to have docker trying to fight with systemd, etc. Docker was not interested (in the early years) in adopting cgroups v2 or daemonless / rootless operation, and they wanted everyone to pay to use Dockerhub on the public internet rather than running their own internal registries, so docker-cli didn't support alternate registries for a long long time. And it seemed like they disliked systemd for "ideological" reasons to an extent that they didn't make much effort to resolve the problems that would crop up between docker and systemd. Because Docker didn't want to build the product that corporate customers wanted to use, and didn't accept patches when Red Hat tried to get them implemented those features themselves, eventually Red Hat just went out and built up Podman, Quay, and the entire ecosystem of tooling that those corporate customers wanted themselves (and sold it to them). That was a bit of an own goal.
- Normal_gaussian 9mo ago

OptionOfT 9mo ago

I just want to disable "Ask Gordon" in the sidebar. I don't want to see it. My brain works in weird ways. Whenever I see a name for the first time I attach that person to it. Gordon is the character from Half Life. Docker a piece of software. Don't anthropomorphize it.

gordonhart 9mo ago
Eventually there will be enough anthropomorphized pieces of software for everybody to have their "Alexa" moment. Mine came last year (thanks, Docker).
Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
Gordon was the office pet tortoise if I recall, and might still be around given they may live a very long time. Thus it became the default user in parts of their software. =3
- bmitch3020 9mo ago
  Gordon unfortunately passed away in 2023: https://x.com/solomonstre/status/1637537983988629504 https://x.com/solomonstre/status/1637537983988629504
  - Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
    In a way, it is fun the memory still affects design choices. =3

lifetimerubyist 9mo ago

My favorite thing about Docker is that it spawned Podman.

outcoldman 9mo ago

If somebody missed it, apple/container is a good replacement for Docker for Mac on macOS. I have been using it for the last 6 months, there are issues, but also team is actively developing it. https://github.com/apple/container https://github.com/apple/container

embedding-shape 9mo ago
Does that let you build images on a macOS host that works on Windows and Linux too? It doesn't seem to talk about what platform the images support, only where you could run containers.
- outcoldman 9mo ago
  Not sure about Windows, but yes to Linux. It runs linux containers (not darwin), plus can have rosetta. And I build multi arch images (arm64/amd64). It uses buildkit, the same Docker uses, so I am sure you can build Windows containers with it as well. Just a note, I am working for the org, that sells enterprise software shipped as container images, publishes on Docker Hub and RedHat. No issues migrating to apple/container.
pawelduda 9mo ago
How is the performance overhead of this compared to docker on MacOS?
- outcoldman 9mo ago
  The only big noticeable issue for me was building a large enterprise images (like Splunk). This issue was fixed [1]. Other than that I have not seen any issues with IO or performance. Running Splunk/OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, some performance tests, enterprise software written in Go (building for arm64/amd64). No issues at all. 1. https://github.com/apple/container/issues/68 https://github.com/apple/container/issues/68
cpuguy83 9mo ago
I haven't personally used it, but containerd also has "nerdbox": http://github.com/containerd/nerdbox http://github.com/containerd/nerdbox

Havoc 9mo ago

Reminds me a bit of stuff like curl - the importance of it and the monetization opportunities are out of sync. Tricky

justonceokay 9mo ago
I’m currently building a micro transaction version of `ls`
- Loeffelmann 9mo ago
  An AI version of ls and fzf bringing your file system to the AI age
- yomismoaqui 9mo ago
  https://www.ycombinator.com/apply https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
  - Havoc 9mo ago
    Not a charity - they’re going to want to see a viable eventual monetization path too
    - Macha 9mo ago
      Pretty sure that was meant to be a jab (mostly at YC) rather than a serious suggestion
      - Havoc 9mo ago
        Ah right. Very plausible

godzillabrennus 9mo ago

I switched to Podman on Windows and found it less laggy, and it works fine for local development. I'm sure I'm missing some features, but as Docker continues to struggle to generate revenue, the open-source option will be important to an increasingly large part of the industry. FYI- If I was docker, I'd stand up some bare metal hosting (i.e., a Docker Cloud) designed around making it easier for novice developers to take containers and turn them into web applications, with a product similar to Supabase built around this cloud to let novice developers quickly prototype and launch apps without learning how to do deployments in more sophisticated clouds. Supabase and AI vibe coders pair well, but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve. It keeps many vibe coders trapped in AIO vibe coding platforms like Lovable and AI Studio.

embedding-shape 9mo ago
> but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve Is it really a hole? I'm not the target user, but I keep coming across "Build & deploy your own platform/service/application with VibeCodingLikeThereIsNoTomorrow" and similar, maybe new one every week or so.
- godzillabrennus 9mo ago
  Seems like its a hole in the market if new services are cropping up. If there wasn't a hole then established clouds would have this. I don't have to think if I want a virtual machine booted with Ubuntu. I can do that in any cloud. How many have vibe coding support to launch containers that work locally in a cloud so they are accessible as a website? How many of those have a build process that does security checks and helps patch the code and automates building browser tests to verify the functionality keeps working (or kicks it back to the coding agent to fix)? Basically, the last 10% of the vibe coding a web app locally that isn't automated. This is a big opportunity for a semi established vendor like Docker that a startup would need users and capital (for bare metal) to fix. Two things that a Docker has at their disposal.

radioradioradio 9mo ago

Seems like (according to the author) whatever docker is doing it is a sign of their immediate demise and everyone on HN is cheering for the company to go down in flames no matter what. The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem? Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they just stay stagnant? Has made hardened images free instead of making that a premium feature only for people in banks? - and monitising SLAs, how is that a problem? Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using, but apparently at the same time Docker is deeply irrelevant and should not make money - while all of us on HN with well paid tech jobs get to have high thoughts on their every move to pay their employees and investors...

amluto 9mo ago
> Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman Podman? Podman appears to have reimplemented basically everything. What runtime are you talking about?
- JCattheATM 9mo ago
  Hub.
  - amluto 9mo ago
    What do you mean? There is a website called Docker Hub. There is a competing product, affiliated with Podman, called Quay, which is also a website and an on-prem solution that I think you can pay for and also an open-source product: https://github.com/quay/quay https://github.com/quay/quay
    - JCattheATM 9mo ago
      > There is a competing product, affiliated with Podman, called Quay Most stuff is not published on Quay; most podman users use Docker Hub or Compose files.

skwashd 9mo ago

A few times I've wondered, where would Docker Inc be today if Microsoft acquired them back in 2017? Early 2017 was peak Docker and Docker Inc. Those were the days. Container hype was everywhere. Before moby. Before all the pivots. Microsoft was embracing open source and the cloud. They were acquiring dev tools. It was a missed opportunity for both companies.

eigencoder 9mo ago
I don't want Microsoft's fingers all over docker -- if anything that would have accelerated the rise of e.g. podman
hamdingers 9mo ago
They probably would've kept autobuilds free for open source and I wouldn't have switched to GHCR and Github Actions for all my projects. Seems Microsoft got my "business" anyway.

jrm4 9mo ago

I think this deserves a reframing: Docker is perhaps the greatest success story involving a massively invested tech company. We got an amazing durable essential piece of software from someone investing billions of dollars. Now, the fact that they didn't get their money back, well, who cares? Not me, it wasn't my money. Sucks for them, maybe -- but that's far better than enshittification for everyone.

bmitch3020 9mo ago

Another year, another story written about the demise of Docker. This has been happening since before Kubernetes took off. My own take: Docker had a choice of markets to go after, the enterprise market was being dominated by the hyperscalers pushing their own Kubernetes offerings. So they pivoted to focus on the developer tooling market. This is a hard market to make work, particularly since developers are very famous for not paying for tooling, but they appear to making a profit. With Docker Hub, it's always been a challenge to limit how much that costs to run. And with more stuff being thrown in larger images, I don't want to see that monthly bill. The limits they added hurt, but also made a lot of people realize they should have been running their own mirror on-prem, if not only to better handle an upstream outage when us-east-1 has a bad day. Everything else has been pushing into each of the various popular development markets, from AI, to offloading builds to the cloud, to Hardened Images. They release things for free when they need to keep up with the competition, and charge when enterprises will pay for it. They've shifted their focus a lot over the years. My fear would be if they stayed stagnant, trying to extract rents without pushing into new offerings. So I'm not worried they'll fail this year, just like I wasn't worried any of the previous years when similar posts were made.

drnick1 9mo ago

Why should a company be making money selling what is a essentially a thin layer of convenience over kernel features?

shykes 9mo ago

Hi, I'm the founder of Docker. I started it in 2008 (under the name Dotcloud) and left in 2018. AMA.

jiehong 9mo ago
What would you have done differently in retrospect?
- shykes 9mo ago
  What I would tell my younger self: Only listen to your users and customers, ignore everyone else. Don't hire an external CEO unless you're ready to leave. Hiring a CEO will not fix the loneliness of not having a co-founder. Having haters is part of success. Accept it, and try to not let it get to you. Don't partner with Red Hat. They are competitors even though they're not honest about it. Not everyone hates you even though it may seem that way on hacker news and twitter. People actually appreciate your work and it will get better. Keep going.
McP 9mo ago
What are your thoughts on Podman?
- shykes 9mo ago
  Imitation is the highest form of flattery! Obviously there was demand for an alternative to Docker that was native to the Red Hat platform. We couldn't offer that (although we tried in the early days) so it made sense that they would. In the early days we tried very hard to accommodate their needs, for example by implementing support for devicemapper as an alternative to aufs. I remember spending many hours in their Boston office whiteboarding solutions. But we soon realized our priorities were fundamentally at odds: they cared most about platform lock-in, and we cared most about platform independence. There was also a cultural issue: when Red Hat contributes to open source it's always from a position of strength. If a project is important to them, they need merge authority - they simply don't know how to meaningfully contribute to an upstream project when they're not in charge. Because of the diverging design priorities, they never earned true merge rights on the repo: they had to argue for their pull requests like everyone else, and input from maintainers was not optional. Many pull requests were never merged because of fundamental design issues, like breaking compatibility with non-Red Hat platforms. Others because of subjective architecture disagreements. They really didn't like that, which led to all sorts of drama and bad behavior. In the process I lost respect for a company I once admired. I also think they made a mistake marketing podman as a drop-in replacement to Docker. This promise of compatibility limited their design freedom and I'm sure caused the maintainers a lot of headaches- compatibility is hard! Ultimately the true priority of podman - native integration with the Red Hat platform - makes it impossible for it to overtake Docker. I'm sure some of the podman authors would like to jettison that constraint, but I don't think that's structurally possible. Red Hat will never invest in a project that doesn't contribute to their platform lock-in. Back when RH was a dominant platform, that was a strength. Nowadays it is a hindrance.

blackcatsec 9mo ago

I truly do sometimes detest the open source community's often outright hostility towards monetization of software. People gotta eat.

onraglanroad 9mo ago
I've been to developer conferences in the US. Lack of food is definitely not a problem.
- jujube3 9mo ago
  He shoots, he scores!
shortsunblack 9mo ago
Open source community detests dilettante attempts at rent seeking by building mediocre wrappers over commodity software. Docker did not invent Linux containers. They did not invent namespaces or chroots. You'll be hard pressed to name the things they did invent and those things have long ago left Docker to hang dry (OCI imagespec). OrbStack is built by a single person and it provides an objectively better experience than Docker Desktop, built presumably by dozens of full time engineers. People detest incompetence and rent seeking. That they do. The lack of important contributions of Docker can be best summarized by all the alternatives that popped up in no time. With Kubernetes now defaulting to CRI-O, modern container stack has precisely zero Dockerisms.

singularity2001 9mo ago

Superfluous!

shermantanktop 9mo ago

New cool tech is almost never a moat. It will get a company started but if the tech has any success, that success is always replicable (even if the exact tech isn’t). IP protection is worthless and beside the point. The only moat is the creativity of a company’s core staff when they spend a lot of time on valuable problems. Each thing they produce will grow, live, and die, but if the company has no pipeline it is doomed. And VCs know this, which is why they want to pump startups up, and then cash out before they flop, even while founders talk about all the great things they can do next. Naming your company after your one successful product is a pretty good sign of a limited lifespan.

neom 9mo ago

I think what happened to docker is a bit unfortunate. March 2013 — Docker goes public/open source at PyCon Nov 2013 — Jerry Chen pursues Docker, leads to Greylock Series B - Jan 2014 — Greylock Series B closes ($15M) - June 2014 — Kubernetes announced - July 2015 — Kubernetes 1.0 released. Jerry is a good friend of mine and I think a great VC, he comes from the VMware world and was part of building the VMware enterprise strategy. When all the container stuff was all going down, I was trying to understand how digialocean needed to play in the container space - so I spent a lot of time talking to people and trying to understand it (decided we basically...shouldn't, although looked at buying Hashi) - but it was clear at the time the docker team went with Jerry because they saw themselves either displacing VMware or doing a VMware style play - either way, we all watched them start the process of moving to a real enterprise footing out of just a pure play devtool in 2014, it might have worked too (although frankly their GTM motions were very very strange), but Kubernetes..yah. You might recall Flo was on the scene too selling his ideas at Mesosphere, and the wonderful Alex Polvi with CoreOS. It was certainly an interesting time, I think about that period often and that it is a bit of a shame what happened to docker. I like Solomon a lot and think he's a genuinely genius dude.

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago

> For developers, this doesn’t change much. Docker containers will continue to work, and the open source nature of Docker means the technology will persist regardless of what happens to the company. But it’s worth watching how Docker Inc’s search for identity plays out - it could affect the ecosystem of tools and services built around containers. Things will actually change quite a bit. First of all, millions of people depend on Docker Desktop, and Podman Desktop is (as everything from RedHat is) a poor replacement for it. And the Docker CLI and daemon power a huge amount of container technology; Podman is, again, quite a poor replacement. If these solutions go away, a large amount of business and technology is gonna get left in the lurch. Second, most of the containerized world depends on Docker Hub. If that went away, actually a huge swath of businesses would just go hard-down, with no easy fix. I know a million HNers will be crying out about the evils of "centralization", but actually the issue is it's corporate-run rather than an open body. The architecture should have had mirrors built-in from the start, but even without mirrors, the company and all its investment and support going away is the bigger rug-pull. The industry and ecosystem have this terribly human habit of rushing at the path-of-least-resistance. If we don't plan an intelligent, robust migration strategy away from Docker, we'll end up relying on something worse.

forty 9mo ago
Why do you say podman is a poor replacement? It has been consistently a better replacement for me on Linux, with easy rootless, daemon less, quadlet, etc. And at work where I have to use macos, it works just as well.
- Spivak 9mo ago
  Yeah, people are sleeping on Podman who is now genuinely leading the space now that docker-engine is all but in maintenance mode. Quadlets are amazing and greatly simplify the deployment and management of containers. The systemd integration is so good because you have this battle tested process manager with a gazillion features and you can use them with your containers for free. Podman can run pods, hence the name, which is an abstraction that k8s has proven is useful but docker completely lacks. Podman pushing k8s manifests as an (imho better) compose with podman play is refreshing. And it can be dropped in with Quadlets too. Podman can generate your k8s manifests from your running containers. Get everything running how you like and save. buildah frees you from Dockerfile and lets you build containers completely rootlesslessly.

ynx 9mo ago

> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit - they created the containerization standard that everyone uses. The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value. I would argue the reverse: that Docker's value was itself the product-market fit. Docker the technology was commoditized and open-source almost from its genesis, because its technology had been built by Borg engineers at Google. It provided marginally more than ergonomics, but ergonomics was all it needed - the missing link between theory and practice.

Conan_Kudo 9mo ago
Well, technically the technology was originally built by IBM folks, as that's where LXC came from. But otherwise yes, your point makes sense.
- shykes 9mo ago
  Google developed linux cgroups. IBM developed linux namespaces. Docker developed a completely new application runtime and delivery system, built on cgroups, namespaces, aufs, and tar. This required lots of original design and engineering work. Prior to Docker, there was no runtime contract for distinguishing the portable application bits from the non-portable host-specific bits. You just got a machine, and then had to provision, configure and templatize it - then upload application bits into it yourself. All three companies contributed significantly to the modern container stack. As the co-founder of Docker, and someone who spent 10 years toiling away at container technology before it finally became cool, I wish people had more appreciation for the amount of engineering and design work that went into that. Google and IBM contributed the primitives that made Docker possible. But Docker made genuine contributions of its own.

mystraline 9mo ago

Admittedly, on my infrastructure, Ive been de-dockerizing. Theres too many footguns and little gotchas, and they all add up. For example, sharing a graphics card, say a Intel A380 and Jellyfin, over docker is a TERRIBLE experience. But the same, with a full VM, and the gfx card shared to it is easy peasy. Now, for testing applications, docker is great. But when I decide to run a service, I'll de-dockerize OR single VM with docker inside, with cronjobs to once a week update. And logging/monitoring is also a hell of a lot easier per machine, rather than 8 services through docker. I'm sure if I need a full dynamic service fabric, sure go with Docker or K8s. But this is for personal and friend usage.

sneak 9mo ago

Docker is only successful because of free software: the foss docker daemon, the foss docker cli client, and of course linux. Docker tried to become a proprietary software company, which is rude and user-hostile.

ragall 9mo ago

It's a good thing that the commons are cheap. Imagine where we would be if all electrical devices were still covered by patents related to electricity, all owned by one company.

0hw0t 9mo ago

It's a config DSL for a config DSL (OS files). Docker isn't much different from an AI wrapper. What was this mighty corporate machine supposed to become shipping config scripts? The team I was before Docker got popular just used the OG container, user accounts, and set up namespaces and cgroups per user. Docker represents perfectly the issue with the software industry; it is software that duplicates existing software chasing "line go up" not actual utility. No net new utility just different semantics to perform sys admin work. Developers did not want to learn sys admin, and instead learned a meta-Docker-driven-sysadmin anyway.

jesse_dot_id 9mo ago

We use swarm in production and love it. K8s is extreme overkill for a high percentage of most of the shops who are using it, in my estimation.

wcallahan 9mo ago

I suspect the timing of this and comments is not coincidental. I pay for Docker licenses, even though not meeting the criteria for business size requiring it, as I wanted reliable image fetching for my self hosted container CI/CD pipelines failing docker hub image fetches. But as of now, my oAuth logins to Docker expire within hours now, and I’ve been left with no choice but to scatter in search of diffuse container image alternative sources for my Dockerfiles to stop this madness. My one way permanent migration from Docker Hub sourced images has finally left me with no reason to keep paying for Docker licenses due to whatever this misguided or blundered rate limit implementation is.

vegabook 9mo ago

It's become what happens when others learn your simple card trick.

kordlessagain 9mo ago

I use it with this every day: https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/codex-container https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/codex-container Docker is useful and it’s too bad early and ignorant investors poisoned the well. Their new AI stuff is bad but maybe if they positioned themselves like Ollama….

jaynamburi 9mo ago

Docker started as a simple, opinionated UX around Linux containers and became a product company wrapping an ecosystem that moved on without it. The original breakthrough wasn’t containers themselves (LXC already existed), but the combination of: a reproducible image format, layered filesystem semantics, a simple CLI, and a registry model that made distribution trivial. That unlocked a whole workflow shift. What happened next is that Docker the company tried to own the platform, while the industry standardized around the parts that mattered. The runtime split into containerd/runc, orchestration moved to Kubernetes, image specs went to OCI, and “Docker” became more of a developer UX brand than a core infrastructure primitive. Today Docker mostly means: A local dev environment (Docker Desktop) A build UX (Dockerfile, buildx) A compatibility layer over containerd A commercial product with licensing constraints Meanwhile, production container infrastructure largely bypasses Docker entirely. That’s not failure it’s a common arc. Docker succeeded so well that it got standardized out of the critical path. What remains is a polished on ramp for developers, not the foundation of the container ecosystem. In other words: Docker won the mindshare, lost the control, and pivoted to selling convenience.

subsection1h 9mo ago
All of the comments posted by the HN account named jaynamburi were written using an AI. Gemini confirms this: "Based on an analysis of the comments on the profile you linked, it is highly likely that they are written by an AI (or a human heavily using an LLM to generate responses)."

VLM 9mo ago

The key business mistake is trying to have too large of a company or having the wrong organization structure. Consider how a SCM like git or bitkeeper is more complicated than a wrapper for LXC. For some odd reason Docker has almost 100x as many employees as bitkeeper. They're just too big. It would be like trying to create a startup of "/bin/ls as a service" with at least 50 employees and 49 of them would not be able to generate enough revenue to break even much less turn into a billion dollar "LSaaS" tech unicorn. There's not enough meat for the pack. FreeBSD has jails and all of FreeBSD (not just jails, the whole thing) is about a third the size of Docker... hmm. An alternative to having an appropriate sized company would be giving up on profit. There probably is no way to make "real" money doing what Docker is doing, not "real" in the context of 1500+ employees. It would be very real if they could get their current revenue with 20 employees, but ... That is not bad, that just means they're better off as an IRS 501(c)(3) approved charity rather than trying to become a startup unicorn. Large organizations like the Red Cross are a valuable and important addition to the community, despite not being a successful tech unicorn. They got a lot of money from In-Q-Tel so they're already kind of taxpayer funded (via CIA) so going outright charity wouldn't be a stretch. A good business analogy for Docker would be the small day care my kids attended. They were based in a small church building which permanently limited the size of their state license. It doesn't matter if they hire 3 caregivers or 1500, they only have space for an 8 kid license and revenue will never exceed 8 kids. They can hire 1500 caregivers using VC funds but they'll never get more than 8 kids of revenue. They are not working in a field where they can scale to a billion dollars of revenue. There's nothing "wrong" about a daycare that rents a room of a church, employs a couple "early childhood education major" college grads right around minimum wage, and the kids have fun. Thats Docker. There is perhaps a bigger third problem that they probably sold themselves to investors as an unstoppable money printing machine. Whoops. Nobody makes that mistake with the local church daycare. To some extent lack of due diligence is the fault of the investors. We'd never have had docker without their ... selfless financial donation.