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Comment by foota | Hacker News Reader

My first reaction was that I was surprised it wasn't higher.

My second reaction was incredulity at how ridiculous my first reaction was.

Redhat has a market cap of around 15 billion, that gives a rough idea of what kind of value Docker could build with a purely service based model for an open source product.

Redhat has a vast product suite now - they do a heck of a lot more than just RHEL, and a lot of it is "enterprise" stuff with juicy support contracts. Docker is a one-trick pony in comparison.

Wasn't RedHat a one trick pony at one point? I don't think it's insane to be that they'll be as successful as RedHat one day and it seems these investors would like to bet on it.

I think (with the exception of OpenShift), most of RH products are acquisitions. I can think of plenty of acquisitions Docker can make to take a similar path; Portainer, Kotena, some CI software (Drone, etc.) All that would kind of make Docker Inc a one-stop shop for startups (definitely) or whoever else wants everything from one company.

A startup can get the same stack and much more from AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. If it should bet on one company, it should bet on the cloud it's already using.

OpenShift is also an acquisition (OpenStack is not). [1]

What you say makes sense, but then Docker is also coming 10-12 years late to the game, and until it's profitable and has money in the bank it's hard to do many expensive acquisitions.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/makara

OpenShift started before Makara with a simple code base called "OpenShift Express". The code acquired with Makara was never used in the hosted service or what became the open source project, although some ideas crossed over.

OpenShift 3 (current) has no code in common with any of the older space. It was a totally new platform built on top of Kubernetes and docker.

I wouldn't call it a one trick pony. Their docker cloud is pretty compelling in some ways.

They seem to be in a unique position to monetize with multiple models. Compared to something like Github, Docker and Docker Swarm has much more opportunity for large enterprise support contracts. Most companies feel that Docker is synonymous with containers, yet still don't fully understand the technology. Git already had a high adoption years before Github was around so developers were familiar with it (or other VCS) and didn't need to spend thousands of dollars to support a git repo.

On the other hand, curious how much revenue DockerHub is bringing in and where they will plan on taking it. That model seems closer to Github. Will it be a newer way to discover new OS or even propriety images like how devs use Github?

My bet is that Docker develops a very healthy services business, offering consulting services to companies that wish to use Docker within their organization, on par with RedHat on Linux. With that, a $1.3b valuation is the tip of the iceberg.

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