What has Docker become? • Hacker News Board

Re: What has Docker become?

#271

Post by shortsunblack » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

blackcatsec wrote: post #135

I truly do sometimes detest the open source community's often outright hostility towards monetization of software. People gotta eat.

Open source community detests dilettante attempts at rent seeking by building mediocre wrappers over commodity software.

Docker did not invent Linux containers. They did not invent namespaces or chroots.

You'll be hard pressed to name the things they did invent and those things have long ago left Docker to hang dry (OCI imagespec).

OrbStack is built by a single person and it provides an objectively better experience than Docker Desktop, built presumably by dozens of full time engineers.

People detest incompetence and rent seeking. That they do.

The lack of important contributions of Docker can be best summarized by all the alternatives that popped up in no time. With Kubernetes now defaulting to CRI-O, modern container stack has precisely zero Dockerisms.

Re: What has Docker become?

#272

Post by monkchips » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

shykes wrote: post #162

incognito124 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's next for Dagger? Any upcoming features?

Yes :) We heard the feedback that we should pick a lane between CI and AI agents. We're refocusing on CI. We're making Dagger faster, simpler to adopt. We're also building a complete CI stack that is native to Dagger. The end-to-end integration allows us to do very magical things that traditional CI products cannot match. We're looking for beta testers! Email me at solomon@dagger.io

This is the way

Re: What has Docker become?

#273

Post by biggestlou » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

shykes wrote: post #133

Hi, I'm the founder of Docker. I started it in 2008 (under the name Dotcloud) and left in 2018. AMA.

How did it feel the first time you or someone on your team built a container and ran it?

Re: What has Docker become?

#274

Post by wakawaka28 » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

mg794613 wrote: post #45

"The problem is that Docker the technology became so successful that Docker the company struggled to monetize it. When your core product becomes commoditized and open source, you need to find new ways to add value." 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…

>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.

They made a unique contribution which was significant in its own way. It doesn't matter in the end that others tried to do related things before and failed to get traction. They could have made Docker more restrictive to make money, and they didn't. Open source is hard to actually make money with, unfortunately for those of us who enjoy it.

Re: What has Docker become?

#275

Post by JustinGarrison » Sun, Jan 25, 2026, 1:56 AM UTC

cpuguy83 wrote: post #239

jeremyjh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So absolutely at least some of that is true. I’d be surprised if the systemd thing was not also true. I think it’s quite likely Docker did not have a good handle on the “needs” of the enterprise space. That is Red Hats bread and butter; are you saying they developed all of that for no reason?

I made no comment about RedHat's offerings. I don't feel like RedHat had to do anything to sell support contracts in this case, because that was already their business. All they had to do was say they'll include container support as part of their contracts. What they did do, AIUI based on feedback in the oss docker repos, is those contracts stipulated that you must run RHEL in the container and the host, and use syst…

I was early container adopter at a large RHEL shop and they absolutely required us to use their forked version of docker for the daemon and RHEL based images with systemd.

This was mostly so containers could register with systems manager and count against our allowed systems.

We ignored them because it was so bad and buggy. This is when I switched to CoreOS for containerized workloads.

Re: What has Docker become?

#276

Post by aragilar » Sun, Jan 25, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

troyvit wrote: post #158

travisgriggs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I tried docker. Didn’t like the odor of enshittification, and so switched to podman (desktop). I use it on macOS, and deploy on Ubuntu. It’s been smooth sailing. I found the signal to noise ratio better in Podland. As a newb to docker space, I was overwhelmed with should I swarm, should I compose, what’s this register my thing? And people are freaking about root stuff. I’m sure I still only use and understand ab…

Yeah I was pretty hard on podman in that comment but the truth is I use it over docker wherever I can. I have a mixed environment at home but settled on RedHat for the home server and everything seems totally ok. I really like quadlets, and the ability to go rootless is a big load off my mind to be honest. I do wish they'd package it for other distros though. It would save some headaches.

Podman is in Debian and has been for a while (and so will eventually propagate to all its derivatives). I would presume Arch and SUSE have it, not sure about Gentoo, what other host distros are missing?

Re: What has Docker become?

#277

Post by jvinet » Sun, Jan 25, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

chuckadams wrote: post #186

abronan wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but swarm was never intended to be a kubernetes contender. Your comment is accurate for the original Swarm project, but a bit misleading regarding Swarm mode (released later on and integrated into docker). I have worked on the original Swarm project and Swarmkit (on the distributed store/raft backend), and the latter was intended to compete with Kubernetes. It was certainly an ambitious and borderline delusional st…

I love Kubernetes, but it's still a big leap from docker-compose to k8s, and swarm filled that niche admirably. I'm still in that niche -- k8s is overkill for every one of my projects -- but k3s is pretty lightweight, easy to install, and there's a lot of great tooling for k8s I can use with it. Still wish there were something as simple as "docker-compose plus a couple bits" that was swarm mode -- I'm drowning in YAM…

Maybe Uncloud would fit the bill?

Re: What has Docker become?

#278

Post by yencabulator » Sun, Jan 25, 2026, 7:26 PM UTC

rmccue wrote: post #42

> Docker’s journey reads like a startup trying to find product-market fit, except Docker already had product-market fit 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…

> The core Docker technology was an excellent product

Nah, the core Docker technology was an utter shitshow programmed by people without the relevant experience.

The Go IRC channel fielded repeated questions from Docker developers on how to unpack a compressed tarball from a streaming source.

At one point, Docker computed a hash of the files it downloaded, but never compared the hash to anything.

Docker was always below par for the space it wanted to be in. They had good marketing. The story has many commonalities with MongoDB.

Re: What has Docker become?

#279

Post by Moto7451 » Sun, Jan 25, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #124

Moto7451 wrote: post #36

One thing that really hurt them from my PoV was how they acted when they changed their licensing structure with respect to revenue generating companies. I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do. However, I think they just made people distrust their motives with their approached to this. At two places I worked their reps reached out to essentially ensnare the company in a s…

> 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. What exactly are you objecting to? Since you say “I’m fine with the idea that licensing Docker and Docker Desktop is a good thing to do” it’s not the change, so what is it? The 30 days, them saying they would sue after that, or the tone? I haven’t seen t…

I don’t object to licensing software. It’s the way they went about it. Individual EMs and ICs being targeted and intimidated vs going through a procurement/legal channel. The companies I’ve worked for have staff lawyers for a reason. If they have a legal objection they should take it up with them. Not someone trying to work through a React bug.

Re: What has Docker become?

#280

Post by Moto7451 » Sun, Jan 25, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

ajcp wrote: post #115

dangus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Device management != micromanaging developer workflow. At my midsize company, our engineers could absolutely say something like “we don’t like Terraform Cloud, we want to switch to OpenTofu and env0” and our management would be okay with it and make it happen as long as we justify the change. We wouldn’t even really have to ask permission if the change was no cost.

-> and make it happen. I think OPs point is they failed on this part. "Making it happen" should have been ensuring a compliant and approved version of the software was the one made available to the developers. At a large scale that is done via device management, but even at a medium sized enterprise that should have been done via a source management portal of some sort.

Yup, exactly that. The situation shouldn’t have even happened in the first place but sometimes that’s just how it goes.

I’ve consulted at some places that should have been licensing Dicker Desktop and I just skipped the workflow headaches and used Rancher from the start with the compatibility aliases installed. A lot of places are simply unaware.