[jcrawfordor]

(author)

I'm not sure that we really disagree, but I wrote this sort of late and I also think I wasn't entirely clear. The point I was trying to make is that the "container runtime" part of Docker is a lot less important than the tooling they put around it, and they made Docker Hub a very core part of that broader ecosystem.

[femto113]

I think that in many ways creating a shared, stable namespace for images was actually a bigger contribution than any of the technology. The ability to type somtething like 'FROM python:3' at the top of your Dockerfile and have that automagically mean what you expect was definitely revolutionary in terms of productivity. Behind the scenes I don't know it really matters that much whether that references an image hosted in a repository by Docker the company, or a file in AWS S3, or a tarball from the Python Software Foundation. And that namespace is exactly what they're stabbing in the heart.

[crabmusket]

Namespaces are so important to ecosystems. See the issues with NPM packages, discussions about Cargo organisation names, etc. I was a huge fan of Deno early on because it used "the web" as its package namespace. Every time I see a new tool come out which bakes an assumed default into a "bare name" I die a little.