[mikepurvis]

It's probably also easier to make cottage-industry money from a single useful tool and some associated services/consulting than it is to turn the whole thing into a big company expected to do the hockey stick curve thing (eg Docker).

It'll be interesting to see where Astral ends up landing on that; afaik they have a small team and have only raised seed money, but who knows.

[CamouflagedKiwi]

I don't know if it's easier. I definitely think it's better, but there can be a lure to VC money that puts a company like Docker on that path. There's a world where Docker is a small company earning individually good money but with no hockey stick curve, and I think that's more sustainable and ultimately better for them.

I suppose they might disagree, of course :)

[wbl]

Docker was not gonna make it as a small individual tool as something podman like would get traction in that market.

[mikepurvis]

Maybe, but I think it could have made a small team very wealthy and successful much more than it did a large company.

It was obviously pitched as an ecosystem/platform play, like "the next vmware" or something, but there was never anything close to a real moat there. Running a registry involved a lot of storage and transfer costs plus spam/abuse management, and private registry was always going to be a better fit for being integrated with CI platforms and the like more than a standalone service with its own auth and billing concerns.