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Comment by mdekkers | Hacker News Reader

I have a real issue with Docker Marketing Speak bullshit. "Democratizing containers"? When were they not democratic? What were they before? Tyrannical? or - gasp - communist? And now they are going to ADVANCE THE SOFTWARE CONTAINERIZATION MOVEMENT what does that even mean. Hacker News commenters tend to be pretty smart, and at the time I am posting this, most comments are along the lines of "eh? say what now?" When their core consumers don't understand the message, you can bet your hat that they are not the real target of the message. Or the people at Docker are not good at marketing, which I find harder to believe.

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Docker essentially hijacked the LXC project, failed to give credit, mislead users on the LXC project and as soon as it got traction rewrote the project in Go.

So the 'smartness' of HN when it comes to containers is in question when it failed to hold the 'marketing message' to account and single handedly hyped Docker without any context to LXC, in development since 2007 a whole 6 years before Docker 'discovered' it at dotcloud.

The reason why Docker took LXC containers and ran them without init was never explained or the trade off in complexity compared or questioned, something basic you would expect in a technical forum. The fact that most users remain confused about LXC and Docker on threads even today speaks for itself.

Now it promotes itself as the originator of container technology as if LXC on which it was based does not exist.

And not just LXC but the work of other critical projects like aufs and overlayfs is pushed into the background so Docker can 'claim ownership of containers'. Has Docker contributed code or resources to any of these projects it built on? Do docker users even know the name of the developers?

So no recognition, no support. The message to open source developers is toil for decades and any marketing savvy VC funded company can take your work to market and basically erase your contributions and no one will hold them to account. HN has been ok with this kind of predatory marketing since 2013.

> The message to open source developers is toil for decades and any marketing savvy VC funded company can take your work to market and basically erase your contributions and no one will hold them to account.

I don't want to make a political message here, but this is essentially the risk you take with a more permissive license. Someone absolutely can come along and build a product that subsumes yours. They can create proprietary extensions that you can not use, essentially gaining the benefit of your work without having to return the same favour. Basically, you then have to compete against yourself.

With a copyleft style license, it is much harder (though not completely impossible) for someone to do that. You will most likely be able to use their extensions and will be able to compete on a basis of who is executing better.

There are serious downsides to copyleft style licenses for things like containerisation, though. The barrier to entry is really large and you are going to cut out a lot of players who could help you. So it's really a matter of strategy. But if you are going for a permissive license, you'd better have all your ducks in a row because you should expect something like this to happen.

Free and open source business models are still pretty naive these days and I think it's going to take a few more decades before we have a really good idea of the best way to proceed.

It's exactly what has happened to Docker. Their one product that makes money now has massive competition with all of the other orchestrators that exist. If people want simple they use ECS or Docker CE (which is free). If they want complex they often turn to Kubernetis etc.

I got that reaction too when I read it. There were other, sneakier NLP-like use of language. For example, "Being at the forefront of the container wave, one trend we see emerging in 2017 is containers going mainstream ..." It's a way to sneak in the idea that Docker is "at the forefront of the container wave". By accepting the rest of the sentence, it is easy to accept the earlier clause without challenge.

If anything happened in 2016 in the containerization space, it was that Docker was playing a lot of catch-up to Kubernetes. It seems like they rushed out things and then they botched the OSX native release of Docker in Q2 2016, and lost a lot of goodwill in the community of individual developers (more so than CoreOS did with rkt? That's how it feels like to me. Back then, people thought CoreOS were the assholes for forking. I think that sentiment has shifted). I have not tracked how Docker is doing in enterprise, but I guess they are doing well?

I kinda doubt Docker (specifically, Docker Swarm, and the orchestration tools Docker forced into docker-engine) will ever catch up to Kubernetes, but hey, things move fast, right?

Having said all of that, I like this description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14141832 ... which makes _much_ more sense. Maybe now, someone will use Moby to create a native OSX Docker kit that actually has decent file sync performance (either with unisonfs, rsync, or nfs, and not try to layer it as another FS).

I agree, Docker is in a real pickle. Kubernetes has the momentum and it is decoupling from Docker rapidly.

Docker's biggest asset right now is that everyone has written Dockerfiles already, but unfortunately, Dockerfiles are terrible and people can't wait to get off of them.

Long-term, I expect the platform to be k8s + CoreOS + rkt. Docker's future, if anything, will be in hosting the image repository.

I have been using the Google container registry to store my private images. Costs just a few cents a month for my use case. If you don't want to pay the minimum 7$ per month for more than 1 private image.

https://cloud.google.com/container-registry/

> Long-term, I expect the platform to be k8s + CoreOS + rkt.

I have been dabbling with that same thought for a while too. One thing I have not yet figured out, though, is what CoreOS' vision is for using rkt as a developer on Mac, something a lot of developers are.

rkt on OSX would be neat to see.

We're using Google Container Engine with containervm, which I understand is very similar to CoreOS.

Democratic in this case means bringing it to a wider audience, making it more accessible to regular devs in this case I guess. See definition #3 here https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic

I know you're just helping out, but it's kind of ironic that we need a dictionary reference before we can understand Docker marketing lingo.

Hm no, this is a pretty common usage of the word and I didn't have to look up the definition. Democratization of a technology in English always refers to this definition (same in French and Spanish and most Latin languages).

I am sorry to correct you but in (Spain) Spanish no, in technology it is a fairly recent buzzword that is used mainly in marketing speak. Cannot talk about English, but I feel it's somewhat similar.

Maybe in Spain but in Latin America it is commonly used (I used to live there and my wife's from there). Obviously the expression "democratization of things" is not something people talk about in everyday's life but it is definitely correct.

The project was open sourced yesterday and was only internal to Docker. Since this is open source and not anything they will sell I don't think they are using marketing speak per say.

Honestly this is probably top-down language usage, not a marketing team. Solomon has been talking about containers with this same wording for years, and he's talked about it on podcasts... etc. Granted, that doesn't mean it's not marketing double-speak. Definitely grandiose in a way that marketing language often is.

I didn't know the founder talked like that. Now the whole bruhaha with CoreOS and rkt makes more sense. I remember a lot of Docker fans were angry about it back then. I think 2016 showed that Docker was increasingly getting out of touch and out of sync.

To me, the leading edge and center of gravity has already moved onto Kubernetes (and the various orchestration systems that is attempting to compete with Kubernetes). Even though the buzz around Docker is still growing, the ideas coming out of the Kubernetes community is what is influencing and leading the containerization technologies. Small movements in Kubernetes will result in large movements around people using Docker.

The people at Docker are excellent at marketing. There is very little that's new in Docker. It really just wrappers a lot of core Linux functionality around namespaces and fine grained permissions.

The core functionality of Docker can be implemented in ~100 lines of bash script:

https://github.com/p8952/bocker

IMHO, Docker Marketing has been always been very confusing. I have only looked at Docker very casually over the years. I remember the first time I was browsing through docker.com to figure out what Docker is exactly. It would have been so much easier to understand if they had used the phrase "Linux applications" instead of "applications".

FWIW, democracy and communism are not mutually exclusive.

More on topic though, most of the article is marketing BS so developers have lots of buzzword to give to their bosses when requesting approval for stuff related to Moby.

But this can lead to 'Secular Growth' of containers in the industry.

You're right: as an individual user of Docker, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold to the customer, which is enterprises that see adoption by users as a proof point Docker (the company) boasts about.

Red Hat, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will probably make more money from Docker than Docker.

Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.

At Dockercon it was all Enterprises giving talks about successful Docker deployments and I never heard mention of adoption by users. Only growth on things like downloads etc.

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