[klarrimore]

Think about what redhat was 10 years ago. They were basically a company that burned a Linux distro on a CD and shipped it to CompUSA that sold it for $50. You how exactly everything will unfold but just like we knew linux was the future, I thinks it's becoming obvious that containers are the future as well.

[bonzini]

No, that was Red Hat during the dotcom boom. 10 years ago, they had already acquired JBoss, and RHEL was at its fourth major release (RHEL5; the first was 2.1 :-) in 2002, after which they stopped selling boxed sets). 10 years ago Red Hat was already highly profitable and had been growing for years. But as you point out that only happened after a complete overhaul of the governance and business model.

In that respect, Docker is much more traditional than SuSE or Red Hat, and indeed it would be much harder for anyone else to replicate RH's "miracle" nowadays. [1] And that's exactly because RH is already there and applying its business knowledge to Docker's field.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-wa...