[benmusch]

Seems unlikely that there would be 'enterprise features'... the value of Docker is that you can send a Dockerfile somewhere and it will work identically on each system. If they changed the feature-set of Docker EE it'd undermine the reason people use their product

[majewsky]

I'd guess that if enterprise features were to appear, it would be higher up in the stack then "sending a Dockerfile somewhere". Container runtimes are becoming (or have already become) a commodity, so people are now chasing to get a slice of the orchestration pie before everyone standardizes on Kubernetes.

[danudey]

If the Enterprise Edition is a superset of Community Edition functionality, then this could definitely still happen. EE people could run all CE Dockerfiles, containers, etc., but EE people could also (for their own uses, or from enterprise vendors) run Enterprise docker containers, Dockerfiles, etc.

The situation could turn into something reminiscent of using non-RHEL/CentOS Linux in the enterprise before Ubuntu became popular. Using Debian and need drivers from a vendor? Here's an RPM! Convert it to a .deb, extract it yourself, hope it doesn't have scripts that'll break your install and that the paths work properly. Oh wait this is for a specific patched kernel that RHEL ships, now I have to go get the source and build it myself, but it only ships as patches to a kernel source tree of theirs.

Ubuntu's widespread support helped, and then the advent of VMs made it so that you could hypervisor your hardware and then not have to worry about support in your various OSes. And then vendors started shipping VM images (e.g. AeroFS), but only if you're using a supported virtualization solution (we support both ESIx and HyperV!). Now we have containers, and we can ship customized environments, stripped down and devoid of anything the app doesn't need, but how long until vendors start shipping those containers with assumptions about either the host or the environment/tooling that only works for the people who pay extra?