How are Docker monetizing their product? Is it just in hosting and support? By open sourcing Docker they have opened up the door to hundreds of competitors offering the same thing, often for a much lower cost? Is their only competitive advantage the fact that they own the project and thus understand it better and can dictate its course?
I'm sure they would make for a very interesting case study on how to do open source right.
I'll paraphrase the questions and provide answers best I can
> How are Docker monetizing their product?
We offer commercial support for Docker and also offer paid features on Docker Hub.
> Competition?
Docker is Apache 2 licensed. Anyone can fork Docker and start monetizing it tomorrow in a completely different way than we had anticipated.
This is actually a good thing. There's a separation of Docker between the project and the company, and there's a virtuous cycle of the company aligning to the objectives of the project and the project benefiting by all of the business-y things you can do.
> Competitive Advantage
We don't own the project, the community does. We fundamentally believe the value of a platform or ecosystem is proportional to the amount of competition it brings to everyone. As per above, we have no interest in locking in a competitive advantage on the Docker project that only we can benefit from.
> Doing Open Source Right
We have a long ways to go! We're certainly trying something new - but we've gathered a lot of momentum and our focus is just to continue working with the community, our great partners, and work diligently to deliver great product and support to our users.
That is one way of putting it. Another way is that you're creating a new de facto standard and making sure everyone needs to use it. The partnerships you make build your product into other products, making it the default option for anything someone might need to do with containers. Then you increase the visibility of the product (and thus the company) by getting lots of PR and making sure VCs and potential customers read it.
But competition has nothing to do with open source. Source code is not a competitive advantage, even if you get minor quality improvements like increased code visibility and test coverage. No open source company has ever forked code from an existing product, started a competing business, and stolen business away from the originator. Companies that provide services on top of other people's code, however, often fall victim to a better sales pitch, customized tailored services or a shift in direction.
And honestly, the idea that 'the community' owns the Docker project is a joke. Is the community getting 40 million dollars? Is the community making the design decisions for the product? Is the community pushing the integration of your tool with other companies and services? As far as I can see, you have a company based on a product, and you give that product away because it costs you nothing to do so. Open Source is a marketing tool, and a great one at that.
>No open source company has ever forked code from an existing product, started a competing business, and stolen business away from the originator.
Your main point stands, but one counter-example perhaps worth mentioning is MariaDB (the Enterprise version[1], not just the free version[2]). Oracle's treatment of MySQL was enough to force a reaction from the community to fork and continue to build a drop-in replacement. Although, for the same analogy to apply here a majority of the core Docker developers would need to defect to DockerFork.
I'm glad you bring up partners! They're what I personally focus on 24x7, so have a lot to say on the topic.
> The partnerships you make build your product into other products, making it the default option for anything someone might need to do with containers.
I think you can view some partnerships through that lens, but as a whole I do not believe this statement holds at all.
My #1 partnering goal is to make sure that the interest that exists in Docker can be realized on the services and products that people are using today. You'll never see us form a partnership that has any conclusion, whether direct or indirect, that the only proper way to use docker is in combination with partner technology X.
I think you could also view projects like libcontainer, which is written by some of the maintainers of Docker, and understand that it's being used by other projects not related to Docker at all. In some cases, even by perceived competition (like Pivotal.)
> Then you increase the visibility of the product (and thus the company) by getting lots of PR and making sure VCs and potential customers read it.
It is important to highlight the reasons we make these partnerships - I can assure you, it's not to get VC attention. That's completely short-sighted and unsustainable.
To the best we can, we deflect the visibility on the project on to others, big or small, doing great things with Docker.
> And honestly, the idea that 'the community' owns the Docker project is a joke.
> Is the community making the design decisions for the product?
Yes. The projects design is open. There is no privileged discussion about the Docker project - it happens all in the open on GitHub and IRC. If there's a specific area of conversation that requires in-depth collaboration, we sponsor people to meet in person. This happens regularly.
> Is the community pushing the integration of your tool with other companies and services?
Yes. Red Hat is a perfect example. Pre-0.7, any Red Hat customer could not use Docker because of 1) AUFS not being available on the platform, 2) Docker not being supported on Red Hat. So anyone using Docker on Red Hat at that time was breaking their agreement. That's a problem.
> As far as I can see, you have a company based on a product, and you give that product away because it costs you nothing to do so. Open Source is a marketing tool, and a great one at that.
We can argue the relative advantages and disadvantages of free vs. commercially licensed software all day. You can write Docker off as a sheer marketing ploy, but, I'd say that's a pretty disingenuous statement to make at an individual level of the company.
I'll also say, the trade-off does not come without cost. It's not even close to free.
The main way companies building or built around open source products make money is through services and expertise. Companies like Cloudera and RedHat are two prime examples, they're both built around open source projects but still make excellent money because of their service and support abilities.
True. However, Linux and Hadoop are very complex beasts that really require and benefit from a lot of expertise when deployed in the enterprise. Perhaps I don't fully understand Docker, but really there isn't that much to it. Its a great product and massively useful, but does it really require that extensive knowledge to make the most of it? Docker is really just an extra layer over LXC..
The Docker engine has an ability to use LXC userland tools as an execution environment, but it is not the primary choice. libcontainer (github.com/docker/libcontainer) is. libcontainer has adoption outside of the Docker world (Parallels, CloudFoundry, as examples) which we find to be a fundamentally good thing.
We can also spend time talking about the non-technical values of Docker, if you'd like to jump in to that.
Would you say libcontainer is a reimplementation of LXC? Are they related in the sense that they use the same kernel features with the same goal of isolating processes?
I would say that focusing on libcontainer vs. lxc vs. libvirt/libvirt-lxc, lmctfy or any of the container providers is important in how to work with the kernel and expose an API, but in general each have their own relative merits that suit different audiences.
We would prefer and encourage for competition to exist at this level, but also to support all of the options with Docker as execution drivers.
This is a small example of our approach in general - Instead of locking existing technology out, Docker is designed to integrate seamlessly the choices you're living with today. If we don't do that well, it's a bug. Let's fix it.
Yes, please expound. I am largely just a lone developer looking to use docker for my fairly small projects. I currently just use Git for deployment. Is there any value to moving to Docker?
Leaving aside some of the macro debating points on open source business models, I'm curious how often this kind of competition has ever become a problem for businesses. Docker aren't the first to create a business around open source software they develop. Has this ever killed a business before?
I think there have been some companies that have died that way, yeah. It's tough to make money from open source, if obviously not impossible. Think how hard it is to get a regular old sell-something-for-money business off the ground, then throw in a way more complicated business model and relationships with community, customers and so on.... it's complicated!
I would look at something like MySQL vs. MariaDB vs. ... as soon as the main shepherd of the project has shown not to have the best interest of the community and ecosystem in mind, a prominent fork gets adopted. It definitely takes time.
I'm sure they would make for a very interesting case study on how to do open source right.