[fpp]

Are you not concerned that this move (relabeling the open source version different from how the product is known to the broader public) might further diminish the number of contributors that are now already down 50% / back to 2014 levels?

see https://www.openhub.net/p/docker for statistics on that.

[shykes]

Those stats are wrong. The project has grown massively since 2014 and continues to grow. My guess is that you are looking at the stats for a single repo, when we have broken up the project (and its contribution flow) into many smaller repos.

To answer your question: we think this move will accelerate the growth of the project, because it addresses the two most common concerns from contributors: 1) that the project is too monolithic, and 2) that it's too tied to the Docker product and company.

[jononor]

I added `cli` and `compose` repositories also now. Not sure which other ones should be added.

[shykes]

Off the top of my head: containerd, runc, swarmkit, infrakit, linuxkit, hyperkit, vpnkit, distribution, registry, for-mac, for-win, libnetwork.

[frightening]

> that it's too tied to the Docker product and company

That's good news.

So you're setting up some sort of foundation so that Docker is no longer a gatekeeper for the upstream stuff? I didn't see that in the announcement.

[cookiecaper]

They're essentially attempting to distinguish their commercial offerings from the upstream open-source project. They are cornering the name "Docker" for themselves since it has a lot of name recognition.

This has pros and cons. Red Hat and Mozilla both learned they had to be aggressive with trademarks, as people were distributing sabotaged builds under their product names.

That's why Firefox in Debian is called IceWeasel, for example; any Firefox build that incorporates external patches (or even one that is built with unofficial options, iirc) must not be called Firefox (barring a waiver from the Mozilla Foundation). This allows Mozilla to pursue people who are distributing contaminated builds of "Firefox".

Changing posture on the Docker trademark will make the arguments of Docker Inc. more persuasive should they find themselves needing to make use of the same sort of remedy. It will also make a separate upstream so that Docker will now be based off the "Moby Framework". If Docker Inc. becomes defunct, "Moby" will be an separate project that lost its primary sponsor, not a defunct project bearing the name of a dead company.

The cons are that it's probably a signal that Docker is going to continue working to monetize aggressively, potentially including spurious legal threats that limit the discoverability of competitors and vendors of alternate tooling. For example, it's possible that Kubernetes will no longer work "with Docker" but "with Moby", and the only orchestration for "Docker" will be docker-swarm.

It's also a potential signal that Docker plans to gear more of its work toward its souped-up closed-source distribution available to paying customers only.

The other pro is that Docker as a product totally sucks, so their alienating people in the community will drive users to other solutions that suck less. I keep hoping the containerization fad will go back in the bottle, and while unlikely, this diminishes faith in it since Docker == containers to a lot of people, so that's good.

[ambicapter]

> I keep hoping the containerization fad will go back in the bottle

Is this because containerization in of itself should go back in the bottle, or do you think that people are just taking it too far?

[cookiecaper]

I (mostly) think that people are taking it too far. "Containerization" is an old concept that has been done much better more than once (cf. Solaris/Illumos Zones and FreeBSD jails; I'll refrain from classifying classic chroots as "much better" though it's debatable).

Kubernetes is massively overcomplicated and has bitten off an offensively oversized problem space. The arrogance is staggering.

Ultimately, VMs and containers are attempting to solve the same basic problems, and while containers do have some cool features, there is no way that they justify the gross tradeoffs people are making in service of the fad.