alt Hacker NewsIt didn't help them that they rejected the traditionally successful ways of monetizing open source software. Which is, selling support contracts to large corporate users.
Corporate customers didn't like the security implications of the Docker daemon running as root, they wanted better sandboxing and management (cgroups v2), wanted to be able to run their own internal registries, didn't want to have docker trying to fight with systemd, etc.
Docker was not interested (in the early years) in adopting cgroups v2 or daemonless / rootless operation, and they wanted everyone to pay to use Dockerhub on the public internet rather than running their own internal registries, so docker-cli didn't support alternate registries for a long long time. And it seemed like they disliked systemd for "ideological" reasons to an extent that they didn't make much effort to resolve the problems that would crop up between docker and systemd.
Because Docker didn't want to build the product that corporate customers wanted to use, and didn't accept patches when Red Hat tried to get them implemented those features themselves, eventually Red Hat just went out and built up Podman, Quay, and the entire ecosystem of tooling that those corporate customers wanted themselves (and sold it to them). That was a bit of an own goal.
Replies
When Docker was new I had a really bad ADSL connection (2Mbps) and couldn't ever stack up a containerized system properly because Dockerhub would time out.
I did large downloads all the time, I used to download 25GB games for my game consoles for instance. I just had to use schedule them and use tools that could resume downloads.
If I'd had a local docker hub I might have used docker but because I didn't it was dead to me.
Unfortunately even podman etc.. are still limited by OCIs decision to copy the Docker model.
Crun just stamp couples security profiles as an example, so everything in the shared kernel that is namespace incompatible is enabled.
This is why it is trivial to get in-auditable communication between pods on a host etc…
yes; its really notable that corporates and other support companies (e.g. redhat) don't want to start down the path of NIH, and will go to significant efforts to avoid it. However, once they have done it, it is very hard to make them come back.
I can't help but see a parallel with some of the entertainment franchises in recent years (Star Wars, etc.) -- where a company seems to be allergic to taking money by giving people what they want, and instead insists on telling people what they should want and blaming them when they don't
Absolutely none of this is true. Docker had support contracts (Docker EE... and trying to remember, docker-cs before that naming pivot?).
Corporate customers do not care about any of the things you mentioned. I mean, maybe some, but in general no. That's not what corps think about.
There was never "no interest" at Docker in cgv2 or rootless. Never. cgv2 early on was not useable. It lacked so much functionality that v1 had. It also didn't buy much, particularly because most Docker users aren't manually managing cgroups themselves.
Docker literally sold a private registry product. It was the first thing Docker built and sold (and no, it was not late, it was very early on).