alt Hacker News“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.
Replies
> 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=34377674
BTW just for giggles opened hub.docker.com with Network Tools opened:
368 requests, 9.62MB, Finish: 4.50s.
For a thing which should be a static cached copy with everything bundled. Sure, it's a progress from the previous iterations when it could hang for 30 seconds before actually loading... but this is still ridiculous.
[0] 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:
TRANSACTION START
RUNBATCH set -eux
# TODO find a better userspace architecture detection method than querying the kernel
arch="$(uname -m)"
case "$arch" in \
aarch64) gosuArch='arm64' ;
x86_64) gosuArch='amd64' ;
*) echo >&2 "error: unsupported architecture: '$arch'"; exit 1 ;
esac
curl -fL -o /usr/local/bin/gosu.asc "https://github.com/tianon/gosu/releases/download/$GOSU_VERSION/gosu-$gosuArch.asc"
curl -fL -o /usr/local/bin/gosu "https://github.com/tianon/gosu/releases/download/$GOSU_VERSION/gosu-$gosuArch"
export GNUPGHOME="$(mktemp -d)"
gpg --batch --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org --recv-keys B42F6819007F00F88E364FD4036A9C25BF357DD4
gpg --batch --verify /usr/local/bin/gosu.asc /usr/local/bin/gosu
rm -rf "$GNUPGHOME" /usr/local/bin/gosu.asc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gosu
gosu --version
gosu nobody true
TRANSACTION END
RUN set -eux; \
# TODO find a better userspace architecture detection method than querying the kernel
arch="$(uname -m)"; \
case "$arch" in \
aarch64) gosuArch='arm64' ;; \
x86_64) gosuArch='amd64' ;; \
*) echo >&2 "error: unsupported architecture: '$arch'"; exit 1 ;; \
esac; \
curl -fL -o /usr/local/bin/gosu.asc "https://github.com/tianon/gosu/releases/download/$GOSU_VERSION/gosu-$gosuArch.asc"; \
curl -fL -o /usr/local/bin/gosu "https://github.com/tianon/gosu/releases/download/$GOSU_VERSION/gosu-$gosuArch"; \
export GNUPGHOME="$(mktemp -d)"; \
gpg --batch --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org --recv-keys B42F6819007F00F88E364FD4036A9C25BF357DD4; \
gpg --batch --verify /usr/local/bin/gosu.asc /usr/local/bin/gosu; \
rm -rf "$GNUPGHOME" /usr/local/bin/gosu.asc; \
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gosu; \
gosu --version; \
gosu nobody true
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.