Comment by stingraycharles
14 hours ago
“Docker was famously bad at commercializing anything, we open sourced so much (maybe too much) and still people complained that we were not open enough”
Developers are a tough market to please, especially when your business revolves around open source software.
Unless you have an option to do private cloud hosting (like all these databases and other platforms do), it’s incredibly difficult to monetize.
In the case of docker, I think it’s in the nature of the product that it’s difficult to monetize. Best you can do is enterprise support contracts, but those aren’t good enough to justify all that VC funding.
I don't think it's necessarily that difficult to monetize, they just ignored a lot of the needs of enterprise users (rootless, not punching holes in the firewall, not fighting with systemd, private registries) for long enough that other projects (e.g. Podman, Quay) filled the void.
None of those things were obstacles to commercialization. None of them were common requests from enterprise customers except private registries, which Docker did build.
Podman has never been commercialized.
Docker's difficulties in commercializing were self-inflicted. Enterprise and open source teams were culturally siloed and as a result the enterprise products were not "native". There was a lack of focus and a "checkbox" approach to building product. There was no singular "dictator" who could enforce a coherent product design and vision, and it showed. etc.
I was a DotCloud user before Docker, and I remember keenly thinking - “oh, is that how they went from hosting only PHP to any language/stack?”
I always assumed it was the same internal tech, now productized. Then of course, it became THE tech, overtaking vagrant and anything else for local development and deployment. The latter was the true money shot. Server runs exactly what you test with locally.
> Docker was famously bad at commercializing anything
That's because there was never a proper sysadmin on your team to slap some sense in your decisions.
You've got too opinionated[0], too tied on yourself[1] monster which required too much resources what you can handle alone.
And your market is not the developers but the companies where whose developers have a daytime jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739153
[1] Eg: the syntax to point the image to a specific registry is something... bad. So bad I just abandoned running my own registry, it wasn't worth it.
PS there is still (AFAIK) no support for a transaction-like image building in Compose. So instead of something like this:
people need to write these one-liner abominations:
EDIT: to add on [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35312087
> You've got too opinionated [0]
>>[0] 'Bridge' was and still is an established network term for joining two broadcast domains into one. Why the hell you decided to name your NAT'ed network layer a 'bridge'?
Like they told you 9 months ago, the terminology is exactly right. They're called "bridge" networks because they use Linux `bridge` devices to bridge `tap` adapters of all containers attached to the same Docker network.
There's nothing exotic about this terminology at all and complaining about it betrays your own lack of knowledge.
> PS there is still (AFAIK) no support for a transaction-like image building in Compose. So instead of something like this:
Do you mean Dockerfiles? RUN command has had heredoc support for 5 years now.
https://docs.docker.com/reference/dockerfile/#run
> Like they told you 9 months ago, the terminology is exactly right
Oh, well. I guess you ride to your work on wheels, right? Because while you sit in the car/bus/train it's the wheels what actually rides on the road/track, right?
And if you bothered to look at that comment then why do you ignore what 'macvlan' - which is an actual bridge both in terms of a Linux device and the functionality - is not called 'bridge'?
Because you don't understand the problem. More so, you ignore the actual question there about the broadcast domains.
No, if even if you use a bridge internally when your container is on a isolated network which is invisible to anyone on your network and the container access the network behind your host through the NAT - this can't be called a bridge.
You see, if they just called it as it should, ig:
then they would be both named correctly and be the technically correct - and 99% of Docker users couldn't tell a difference - because they are not net or sys administrators.
But the last 1% is the people who actually makes the workspaces for these developers where they actually do run their fancy-shmancy containers. And for that 1% it surely pays naming this as they are.
And there is also that dumb decision to silently rewrite 127.0.0.1 to Google DNS without a question. Especially when 98% of Docker users are incapable to diagnose it by themselves.
So it's not only the naming of a network functions.
But hey, I'm just knowledge lacking guy without experience at all, just yesterday saw a computer a first time in my life, sure, sure.
> RUN command has had heredoc support for 5 years now
So ten years late? Adoption is off the limits, as you can see - that snippet is from the official Docker image.
And if I need to run multiple commands and not just one RUN statement? Like the people are asking for years? And you so knowledgeable person of course do know the reason for that, right?
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> BTW just for giggles opened hub.docker.com with Network Tools opened: 368 requests, 9.62MB, Finish: 4.50s.
lol What on god's green earth does this have to do with commercializing Docker? Do you really think better lighthouse scores on hub.docker.com was what was holding them back?
Nah it's just a symptom - one of many.
> what was holding them back?
Did you miss 'up to 30 secs' in the previous comment? It's not about lighthouse scores. It's the whole feeling of a hodge-podged project which is run by people who are - maybe - passionate but ultimately lacking in the basics.
The ultimate buyers of their product was the system operators and the system owners - not the developers per se. They failed hard everything that space. Having a dog slow the main content site didn't added anything positive.
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