I feel like this is one of those valuations which makes sense contextually, but not based on any sort of business reality.<p>Docker reminds me a lot of the PKZIP utilities. For those who don't remember, back in the late 80s the PKZIP utilities became a kind of defacto standard on non Unixes for file compression and decompression. The creator of the utilities was a guy named Phil Katz who meant to make money off of the tools, but as was the fashion at the time released them as basically feature complete shareware.<p>Some people did register, and quite a few companies registered to maintain compliance so PKWare (the company) did make a bit of money, but most people didn't bother. Eventually the core functionality was simply built into modern Operating Systems and various compatible clones were released for everything under the sun.<p>Amazingly the company is still around (and even selling PKZIP!) <a href="https://www.pkware.com/pkzip" rel="nofollow">https://www.pkware.com/pkzip</a><p>Katz turned out to be a tragic figure <a href="http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/SEA/katzbio.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONTROVERSY/LAWSUITS/S...</a><p>But my point is, I know of many many (MANY) people using Docker in development and deployment and I know of nobody at all who's paying them money. I'm sure they exist, the make revenue from somewhere presumably, but they're basically just critical infrastructure at this point and just becoming an expected part of the OS, not a company.
I'm so curious to understand how you pitch Docker at a 1.3BUSD valuation. With I assume a potential valuation of ~10BUSD to give the investors a decent exit?<p>Does anyone have an insight into this?<p>Looks like Github's last valuation was at 2BUSD. That also seems high, but I can understand this somewhat better as they have revenue, and seem to be much more widely used/accepted than Docker. In addition to that I can see how Github's social features are valuable, and how they might grow into other markets. I don't see this for Docker...
Docker still has a long way to go in terms of local development ergonomics. Recently, I finally had my chance to on board a bunch of new devs and have them create their local environment using Docker Compose (we're working on a pretty standard Rails application).<p>We were able to get the environments set up and the app running, but the networking is so slow to be pretty much unusable. Something is wrong with syncing the FS between docker and the host OS. We were using the latest Docker for Mac. If the out of the box experience is this bad, it's unsuitable for local development. I was actually embarrassed.
Monetizing open source directly is a bit challenging because you end up stuck in the same service model as everyone else. Which is basically to sell various support contracts to the fortune 100-500.<p>Forking a project into a enterprise (paid for) version and limiting those features in the original open source version, creates tension in the community, and usually isn't a model that leads to success.<p>Converting an open source project directly into a paid for software or SaaS model is definitely the best route as it reduces head count and allows you to be a software company instead of a service company.<p>Perhaps best captured by Github warpping git with an interface and community and then directly selling a SaaS subscription and eventually an enterprise hosted version that is still delivered on a subscription basis just behind the corporate firewall.<p>Also of note is that Github didn't create git itself, and instead was done on the direct need that developers saw themselves, which means they thought what is the product I want, rather than, we built and maintain git, so let's do that and eventually monetize it.
I used docker for a while last year and attended Dockercon. I was really excited about it and thought it was going to solve many of my problems.<p>But with how complicated my stack is, it just didn't make sense to use ultimately. I loved the idea of it, but in the end good old virtual machines and configuration management can basically do most of the same stuff.<p>I guess if you want to pack your servers to the brim with processes and shave off whatever performance hit you get from KVM or XEN, I get it.<p>But the idea of the filesystem layers and immutable images just kindof turned to a nightmare for me when I asked myself "how the hell am I going to update/patch this thing"<p>Maybe I'm crazy, but after a lot of excitement it seemed more like an extra layer of tools to deal with more than anything.
I dont understand containers. First you go to through great pain sharing and reusing libraries. Then you make a copy of all the libraries <i>and</i> the rest of the system for each program !?
Docker generated value from the LXC project, aufs, overlay, btrfs and a ton of open source projects yet few people know about these projects, their authors and in the case of the extremely poorly marketed LXC project even what it is thanks to negative marketing by the Docker ecosystem hellbent on 'owning containers'.<p>Who is the author of aufs or overlayfs? Should these projects work with no recognition while VC funded companies with marketing funds swoop down and extract market value without giving anything back. How has Docker contributed back to all the projects it is critically dependent on?<p>This does not seem like a sustainable open source model. A lot of critical problems around containers exist in places like layers, the kernel and these will not get fixed by Docker but aufs or overlayfs and kernel subsystems but given most don't even know the authors of these projects how will this work?<p>There has been a lot of misleading marketing on Linux containers right from 2013 here on HN itself and one wishes there was more informed discussion that would correct some of this misinformation, which didn't happen.
There's a couple of things in this article that I don't think are true. I don't think Ben Golub was a co-founder of Docker. Maybe he counts as a co-founder of Docker but not of Dotcloud? That seems a bit weird though. I also am pretty sure Docker's headquarters are in San Francisco, not Palo Alto.
I worked with LXC since 2009, then personally built a cloud provider agnostic workflow interface superior in scope to Docker in feature set[1] between about 2013-2014 as a <i>side project</i> to assist with my work (managing multi-DC, multi-jurisdiction, high security and availability infrastructure and CI/CD for a major cryptocurrency exchange). (Unfortunately I was not able to release that code because my employer wanted to keep it closed source, but the documentation[2] and early conception[3] has been online since early days.) I was also an early stage contributor to docker, providing security related issues and resolutions based upon my early LXC experience.<p>Based upon the above experience, I firmly believe that Docker could be rewritten by a small team of programmers (~1-3) within a few month timeframe.<p>[1] Docker has grown to add some of this now, but back then had none of it: multiple infrastructure providers (physical bare metal, external cloud providers, own cloud/cluster), normalized CI/CD workflow, pluggable FS layers (eg. use ZFS or LVM2 snapshots instead of AUFS - most development was done on ZFS), inter-service functional dependency, guaranteed-repeatable platform and service package builds (network fetches during package build process are cached)...<p>[2] <a href="http://stani.sh/walter/cims/" rel="nofollow">http://stani.sh/walter/cims/</a><p>[3] <a href="http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/" rel="nofollow">http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/</a>
I wish people would stop talking about valuation this way, emphasizing the bullshit headline valuation.<p>The reality is that (speculating), they probably issued a new class of stock, at $x/share, and that class of stock has all kinds of rights, provisions, protections, etc. that the others don't, and may or may not have any bearing whatsoever on what the other classes of shares are worth.
Do they actually have any significant revenue? I love developer tools companies, but there are several tools upstarts that have no proven business model. They look like really bad gambles in terms of VC investment, unless you can get in early enough to unload to other fools.
Check out Chef's <a href="https://habitat.sh" rel="nofollow">https://habitat.sh</a> for one fresher take on all this. It moves the containerization approach closer to something that feels like Arch Linux packaging, with a pinch of Nix-style reproducibility. Looks very promising at this point, even if a bit rough on the edges still.
As someone who witnessed the 2000 tech bubble pop, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog's day, except unfortunately this time its not just tech. Its going to end very badly.
Imagine the "value" investors could make if they cordoned off every useful composition of Linux kernel features into a "product" like this.