Comment by truffdog
5 years ago
I remember having a ton of sympathy for CoreOS, Docker really was hard to integrate with as someone doing sysadmin automation stuff.
Docker went to war with the standard Linux init system and the kernel developers who maintained cgroups, their core system primitive. I don't really understand how that was supposed to work out.
I honestly feel that they were both pretty unsympathetic. In particular, CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014. It was very petty -- to say nothing of the petty naming (clearly a play on "Docker") or the generally antagonistic approach. None of this is to forgive Docker, who was equally petty in their response -- and a sign of much more pettiness to come, sadly...
> CoreOS timed their Rocket announcement for the moment at which the Docker team was airborne en route to DockerCon Europe 2014
Would that be the conference where Jessie Frazelle wore this telling gem of a troll badge? [0] If so, the parent article [1] says it was 2015.
I was actually present at CoreOS during this period, and played a significant role in the early rkt releases. There's no prominent memory of timing the announcement to coincide with Docker people being on a plane, I think we were just rushing to get it out by dockercon and the en route thing is a coincidence. Rkt didn't just appear out of nowhere overnight, we had to build it and making something like that actually work reliably as a standalone executable without installing a daemon on arbitrary distros is a bit of a chore.
[0] https://static.lwn.net/images/2016/devconf-badge.jpg
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/676831/
Early CoreOS employee and involved in all of the launch conversations around this...I can confirm there was absolutely no talk of travel plans or catching them at a bad time or anything of the sort. It simply had to get shipped before the conference started so we could talk about it.
No, it was DockerCon EU, December 4-5, 2014 -- and the Docker folks very much believed that it was deliberately timed to their flight several days prior. Unknowable now as that may be, there is no question that Rocket took deliberate aim at Docker -- and timing its announcement to upstage DockerCon is frankly only marginally less petty than timing it to a transoceanic flight. Lest I be seen as defending Docker, Inc. or DockerCon: this is also the only conference that removed a presentation of mine because they didn't like presentations that had more views than their keynotes. So Docker Inc. very much made their own bed, and I understand how Alex and CoreOS got to the point they got to -- but it doesn't mean that they were any more sympathetic in the resulting spat...
5 replies →