Many FreeBSD user do care about jails, but they’re certainly not as easy to use as docker and so they’re not (anymore) going to get anyone rushing to drop Linux and move to FreeBSD.
Docker spanked a ton of VC money hosting the worlds software to create the smooth developer experience that we’ve come to expect from them. I don’t really see how an open source project is supposed to compete with that. Particularly as, whilst they gained a lot of mindshare, they don’t show any signs of getting their money back.
> I don’t really see how an open source project is supposed to compete with that.
Two parts here.
Part 1
docker/cli is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.
Moby is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.
Seems to be OpenSource project for me.
Part 2
Jails were first introduced in FreeBSD version 4.0, that was released on March 14, 2000.
while Docker was publicly released on March 2013. 13 years of advance to give developers what they need. To give enterprises what they need. To get the hype at least.
From my POV - more than enough time to create solution on this. TrueNAS did for NASes.
The VNET enabled FreeBSD Jails (separate network stack) are more complicated - at start only - you need to get to know how to use the new epair(4) VNET interfaces etc.
It's probably easier for specific use cases where Jails better be compared to LXD and when you need "system" inside your VE (virtual environment)/Jail. And that's not what docker targeting much.
For the even simple real life use case, I and my team had for running tests over our site with https://www.sitespeed.io/ :
Use our Docker container to get an environment with Firefox, Chrome, Edge, XVFB and sitespeed.io up and running as fast as you can download them. They work extremely well together with Graphite/InfluxDB and Grafana that you can use to monitor your web site.
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/sitespeed.io" sitespeedio/sitespeed.io:26.1.0 https://www.supersite.io/
Our fronted dev and SEO guys can do from their MacOS/Windows machines with 0 knowledge of Linux and docker, just by copypaste the command in _under_ 5 minutes.
Achieving the same with Jails in even 1 hour is beyond my imagination.
Still struggling to hear any real life good samples of team work with Jails instead of Docker.
