No, everything was already open source, other had done it before too, they just made it in a way a lot of "normal" users could start with it, then they waited too long and others created better/their own products.

"Docker Swarm was Docker’s attempt to compete with Kubernetes in the orchestration space."

No, it never was intended like that. That some people build infra/business around it is something completely different, but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender.

"If you’re giving away your security features for free, what are you selling?"

This, is what actually is going to cost their business, I'm extremely grateful for what they have done for us. But they didn't gave themselves a chance. Their behaviour has been more akin to a non-profit. Great for us, not so great for them in the long run.

At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a sort of “gotcha” scheme where if we were running the version of Docker Desktop after the commercial licensing requirement change, they sent a 30 day notice to license the product or they’d sue. Due to the usual “mid size software company not micromanaging the developers” standard, we had a few people on a new enough version that it would trigger the new license terms and we were in violation. They didn’t seem to do much outreach other than threatening us.

So in each case we switched to Rancher Desktop.

The licensing cost wasn’t that high, but it was hard to take them in good faith after their approach.

Strongly disagree. The core Docker technology was an excellent product and as the article says, had a massive impact on the industry. But they never found a market for that technology at any price point that wasn't ~free, so they didn't have PMF. That technology also only took off in the way it did because it was free and open source.

The tech is open source and free forever - thats somehow a problem? The company monitised enterprise features, while keeping core and hub free - also a problem? Is exploring AI tools, like everyone else is? should they not? should they just stay stagnant? Has made hardened images free instead of making that a premium feature only for people in banks? - and monitising SLAs, how is that a problem?

Docker is still maintaining the runtime on which orbstack, podman etc are all using, and all the cloud providers are using, but apparently at the same time Docker is deeply irrelevant and should not make money - while all of us on HN with well paid tech jobs get to have high thoughts on their every move to pay their employees and investors...

AMA.

- take advantage of the current agentic wave and announce a Docker Sandbox runner product that lets you run agents inside cloud sandboxes

The original breakthrough wasn’t containers themselves (LXC already existed), but the combination of: a reproducible image format, layered filesystem semantics, a simple CLI, and a registry model that made distribution trivial. That unlocked a whole workflow shift.

What happened next is that Docker the company tried to own the platform, while the industry standardized around the parts that mattered. The runtime split into containerd/runc, orchestration moved to Kubernetes, image specs went to OCI, and “Docker” became more of a developer UX brand than a core infrastructure primitive.

Today Docker mostly means:

A local dev environment (Docker Desktop)

A build UX (Dockerfile, buildx)

A compatibility layer over containerd

A commercial product with licensing constraints

Meanwhile, production container infrastructure largely bypasses Docker entirely.

That’s not failure it’s a common arc. Docker succeeded so well that it got standardized out of the critical path. What remains is a polished on ramp for developers, not the foundation of the container ecosystem.

In other words: Docker won the mindshare, lost the control, and pivoted to selling convenience.

https://github.com/apple/container

Docker had a choice of markets to go after, the enterprise market was being dominated by the hyperscalers pushing their own Kubernetes offerings. So they pivoted to focus on the developer tooling market. This is a hard market to make work, particularly since developers are very famous for not paying for tooling, but they appear to making a profit.

With Docker Hub, it's always been a challenge to limit how much that costs to run. And with more stuff being thrown in larger images, I don't want to see that monthly bill. The limits they added hurt, but also made a lot of people realize they should have been running their own mirror on-prem, if not only to better handle an upstream outage when us-east-1 has a bad day.

Everything else has been pushing into each of the various popular development markets, from AI, to offloading builds to the cloud, to Hardened Images. They release things for free when they need to keep up with the competition, and charge when enterprises will pay for it.

They've shifted their focus a lot over the years. My fear would be if they stayed stagnant, trying to extract rents without pushing into new offerings. So I'm not worried they'll fail this year, just like I wasn't worried any of the previous years when similar posts were made.

But the actual experience with developing on VSCode with Dev Containers is not great. It's laggy and slow.

Gordon is the character from Half Life.

Docker a piece of software. Don't anthropomorphize it.

It will get a company started but if the tech has any success, that success is always replicable (even if the exact tech isn’t). IP protection is worthless and beside the point.

The only moat is the creativity of a company’s core staff when they spend a lot of time on valuable problems. Each thing they produce will grow, live, and die, but if the company has no pipeline it is doomed.

And VCs know this, which is why they want to pump startups up, and then cash out before they flop, even while founders talk about all the great things they can do next.

Naming your company after your one successful product is a pretty good sign of a limited lifespan.

Things will actually change quite a bit. First of all, millions of people depend on Docker Desktop, and Podman Desktop is (as everything from RedHat is) a poor replacement for it. And the Docker CLI and daemon power a huge amount of container technology; Podman is, again, quite a poor replacement. If these solutions go away, a large amount of business and technology is gonna get left in the lurch.

Second, most of the containerized world depends on Docker Hub. If that went away, actually a huge swath of businesses would just go hard-down, with no easy fix. I know a million HNers will be crying out about the evils of "centralization", but actually the issue is it's corporate-run rather than an open body. The architecture should have had mirrors built-in from the start, but even without mirrors, the company and all its investment and support going away is the bigger rug-pull.

The industry and ecosystem have this terribly human habit of rushing at the path-of-least-resistance. If we don't plan an intelligent, robust migration strategy away from Docker, we'll end up relying on something worse.

FYI- If I was docker, I'd stand up some bare metal hosting (i.e., a Docker Cloud) designed around making it easier for novice developers to take containers and turn them into web applications, with a product similar to Supabase built around this cloud to let novice developers quickly prototype and launch apps without learning how to do deployments in more sophisticated clouds. Supabase and AI vibe coders pair well, but the hole in the market is vibe coders who want to launch a web app vibe coded but don't know how to deploy containers to the cloud without a steep learning curve. It keeps many vibe coders trapped in AIO vibe coding platforms like Lovable and AI Studio.

Early 2017 was peak Docker and Docker Inc. Those were the days. Container hype was everywhere. Before moby. Before all the pivots.

Microsoft was embracing open source and the cloud. They were acquiring dev tools.

It was a missed opportunity for both companies.

I would argue the reverse: that Docker's value was itself the product-market fit. Docker the technology was commoditized and open-source almost from its genesis, because its technology had been built by Borg engineers at Google. It provided marginally more than ergonomics, but ergonomics was all it needed - the missing link between theory and practice.

Open infrastructure is hard to monetize. Old school robotics players have a playbook for this. You may or may not agree DBs are infra but Oracle has done well by capitalistic standards.

The reality is in our economy exploitation is a basic requirement. Nothing says a company providing porcelain for Linux kernel capabilities has a right to exist. What has turned into OCI is great. Docker desktop lost on Mac to Orb stack and friends (but I guess they have caught back up?) the article does make it clear they have tried hard to find a place to leverage rent and it probably is making enough for a 10-100 person company to be very comfortable but 500-1000 seems very over grown at this point.

Really should not have given up on Swarm just to come back to it. Kubernetes is over kill for so many people using it for a convenient deployment story.

For example, sharing a graphics card, say a Intel A380 and Jellyfin, over docker is a TERRIBLE experience.

But the same, with a full VM, and the gfx card shared to it is easy peasy.

Now, for testing applications, docker is great. But when I decide to run a service, I'll de-dockerize OR single VM with docker inside, with cronjobs to once a week update.

And logging/monitoring is also a hell of a lot easier per machine, rather than 8 services through docker.

I'm sure if I need a full dynamic service fabric, sure go with Docker or K8s. But this is for personal and friend usage.

The team I was before Docker got popular just used the OG container, user accounts, and set up namespaces and cgroups per user.

Docker represents perfectly the issue with the software industry; it is software that duplicates existing software chasing "line go up" not actual utility. No net new utility just different semantics to perform sys admin work.

Developers did not want to learn sys admin, and instead learned a meta-Docker-driven-sysadmin anyway.

  For a while, Docker seemed to focus on developer experience.

We got an amazing durable essential piece of software from someone investing billions of dollars.

Now, the fact that they didn't get their money back, well, who cares? Not me, it wasn't my money.

Sucks for them, maybe -- but that's far better than enshittification for everyone.

Docker tried to become a proprietary software company, which is rude and user-hostile.

I pay for Docker licenses, even though not meeting the criteria for business size requiring it, as I wanted reliable image fetching for my self hosted container CI/CD pipelines failing docker hub image fetches.

But as of now, my oAuth logins to Docker expire within hours now, and I’ve been left with no choice but to scatter in search of diffuse container image alternative sources for my Dockerfiles to stop this madness.

My one way permanent migration from Docker Hub sourced images has finally left me with no reason to keep paying for Docker licenses due to whatever this misguided or blundered rate limit implementation is.

Docker is useful and it’s too bad early and ignorant investors poisoned the well.

Their new AI stuff is bad but maybe if they positioned themselves like Ollama….

Jerry is a good friend of mine and I think a great VC, he comes from the VMware world and was part of building the VMware enterprise strategy. When all the container stuff was all going down, I was trying to understand how digialocean needed to play in the container space - so I spent a lot of time talking to people and trying to understand it (decided we basically...shouldn't, although looked at buying Hashi) - but it was clear at the time the docker team went with Jerry because they saw themselves either displacing VMware or doing a VMware style play - either way, we all watched them start the process of moving to a real enterprise footing out of just a pure play devtool in 2014, it might have worked too (although frankly their GTM motions were very very strange), but Kubernetes..yah. You might recall Flo was on the scene too selling his ideas at Mesosphere, and the wonderful Alex Polvi with CoreOS. It was certainly an interesting time, I think about that period often and that it is a bit of a shame what happened to docker. I like Solomon a lot and think he's a genuinely genius dude.

Consider how a SCM like git or bitkeeper is more complicated than a wrapper for LXC. For some odd reason Docker has almost 100x as many employees as bitkeeper. They're just too big. It would be like trying to create a startup of "/bin/ls as a service" with at least 50 employees and 49 of them would not be able to generate enough revenue to break even much less turn into a billion dollar "LSaaS" tech unicorn. There's not enough meat for the pack. FreeBSD has jails and all of FreeBSD (not just jails, the whole thing) is about a third the size of Docker... hmm.

An alternative to having an appropriate sized company would be giving up on profit. There probably is no way to make "real" money doing what Docker is doing, not "real" in the context of 1500+ employees. It would be very real if they could get their current revenue with 20 employees, but ... That is not bad, that just means they're better off as an IRS 501(c)(3) approved charity rather than trying to become a startup unicorn. Large organizations like the Red Cross are a valuable and important addition to the community, despite not being a successful tech unicorn. They got a lot of money from In-Q-Tel so they're already kind of taxpayer funded (via CIA) so going outright charity wouldn't be a stretch.

A good business analogy for Docker would be the small day care my kids attended. They were based in a small church building which permanently limited the size of their state license. It doesn't matter if they hire 3 caregivers or 1500, they only have space for an 8 kid license and revenue will never exceed 8 kids. They can hire 1500 caregivers using VC funds but they'll never get more than 8 kids of revenue. They are not working in a field where they can scale to a billion dollars of revenue. There's nothing "wrong" about a daycare that rents a room of a church, employs a couple "early childhood education major" college grads right around minimum wage, and the kids have fun. Thats Docker. There is perhaps a bigger third problem that they probably sold themselves to investors as an unstoppable money printing machine. Whoops. Nobody makes that mistake with the local church daycare. To some extent lack of due diligence is the fault of the investors. We'd never have had docker without their ... selfless financial donation.

He'd always try to get us into various technologies, Docker was one of them. It wasn't really relevant for the job, but I could see its uses.

Now that I think about it, I don't think anything they did on the tech discovery front was useful. Got stuck on Confulence which required us to save as a .pdf for our users to view lmao. Credit for being super smart with coding, he was a wiz on code reviews.