Comment by c0balt

> Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.

An "issue" is that Docker these days mostly builds on open standards and has well documented APIs. Open infrastructure like this has only limited vendor lock-in.

Building a docker daemon compatible service is not trivial but was already mostly done with podman. It is compatible to the extent that the official docker cli mostly works with it oob (having implemented the basic Docker HTTP API endpoints too). AWS/GCP could almost certainly afford to build a "podman" too, instead of licensing Docked.

This is not meant to defend the hyperscalers themselves but should maybe out approaches like this in perspective. Docker got among other things large because it was free, monetizing after that is hard (see also Elasticsearch/Redis and the immediate forks).