alt Hacker News> Docker created a standard so successful that it became infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to monetize
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.
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> Open infrastructure is hard to monetize.
But not impossible. Terraform seems to have paid its creator quite well.
The "Fair Source" [1] and "Fair Code" [2] licenses are sustainable and user-friendly.
Imagine if Docker the company could charge AWS and Google for their use of their technology.
Imagine if Redis, Elastic, and so many other technologies could.
Modern database companies will typically dual license their work so they don't have their lunch eaten. I've done it for some of my own work [3].
You want your customers to have freedom, but you don't want massive companies coming in and ripping you off. You'd also like to provide a "easy path" for payments that sustain the engineering, but not require your users to be bound to you.
"OSI-approved" Open Source is an industry co-opt of labor. Amazon and Google benefit immensely with an ecosystem of things they can offer, but they in turn give you zero of the AWS/GCP code base.
Hyperscalers are miles of crust around an open source interior. They charge and make millions off of the free labor of open source.
I think we need a new type of license that requires that the companies using the license must make their entire operational codebases available.
[3] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft/blob/main/LICENSE.md
Imo the problem with SaaS products is that their revenue expectations are priced accordingly to the market they serve, not the money it takes recreating them.
If I wrote the best word processor in the world, I could probably sell it for a decent sum to quite a few people.
However if I expressed my revenue expectations as a percentage of revenue from the world's bestselling novels, I would be very quickly disappointed.