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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

It is obvious that Docker will be acquired very soon. I think the Sequoia investment is a very safe bet, almost a gift. Companies such as VMware are nervous because less VMs are deployed with Docker and there is less impact in performance.

Docker doesn't replace VMs but there is an intersection in their use cases.

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By whom? And for what purpose?

If Docker was about to be acquired, why would there be any interest in raising a round? That dilutes everyone for no purpose. That's not smart.

> By whom? And for what purpose?

VMware? Google? Amazon? RedHat? HP? IBM?

> If Docker was about to be acquired, why would there be any interest in raising a round? That dilutes everyone for no purpose. That's not smart.

It moves the valuation up and it increases the chances of being acquired.

I believe the ideas of containerization used by docker actually cam FROM Google. I remember listening to a speaker talk about how it was based on what Google uses for their production server and is docker is a way for them to share that technology without actually sharing their own proprietary stuff. So I doubt Google would be interested, and I think most other big companies should already have solutions to this problem (at least Microsoft and Amazon for sure).

The idea of containerization is older than Google. You can take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system%E2%80%93level_...

Companies such as Microsoft and VMware who are leaders in the Windows application virtualization sector (via App-V and ThinApp) don't have complete solutions in this space.

Their solutions do a lot of tricks to simulate a container (e.g: user mode hooking, filtering drivers) while Docker uses kernel extensions.

Red Hat and Oracle will murder each other over Docker. I expect 2 to 5 billion in 3 to 5 years.

> If Docker was about to be acquired, why would there be any interest in raising a round?

Build-up a widely recognized brand. Have a complete offering (all the way up to mgmt of containers, as the picture shows). Stay neutral, support all platforms equally well, for some more time (before one of the platforms may buy it). Probably Docker is project a really ambitious picture of wanting to be the big-blue-platform-in-the-cloud in 5-10 years; a picture that --with enough series of funding-- may not even be so far out.

> dilutes everyone for no purpose. That's not smart.

Dilute 10-40% for a company that will soon be making several times the profits; that is very acceptable. If Docker would get there "in time" by itself, it would still make no sense.

But I think Docker knows they need to keep up building out their biz, or they will end up open-source-zoned: everyone knows and uses your product, but you make no serious profits.

Getting open-source-zoned is not a bad thing... Just not a straight ticket to the millions.

The person I replied to was referring to this happening very soon. I was talking about the context of very soon :)

Maybe to have an existing Sequoia portfolio company pay an inflated all cash amount for Docker which effectively lets Sequoia pull money out of the portfolio company without diluting its equity from said portfolio company?

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