[joshfinnie]

This seems like a smart move, but I am still weary as to where Docker is going to land as a company... (the software is great; don't get me wrong)

However, in the grand scheme of things, the more smart people working on Docker, the better!

edit: Yes, I mean "how are they going to make sustainable $"

[huslage]

What do you mean by "land as a company"?

[rmac]

I would guess he means "how are they going to make sustainable $"

Their public acquisitions:

  Fig: cluster deployment configuration
  Orchard: hosting
  Koality: continuous integration

Hosting?

[phamilton]

My hope is that they will provide personal application hosting as a service along with a marketplace. That sounds confusing, but here's why it's intriguing to me.

The iOS app store changed the way developers build and scale software. By publishing Flappy Bird, the creator was able to handle millions of installations without any thought at all. There was no need for payment gateways in distribution either. The author just built it and put it in the app store.

Imagine a similar situation with server side software? Imagine a service like "Oh Life" (recently shut down). Instead of signing up for their service and leaning on them to pay for the operations costs, what if I bought "Oh Life" as a server app and paid my own hosting costs. "Oh Life" goes out of business, but I still have my running copy and can continue to use it forever.

Docker may be the key to creating the right user experience here. Launching an AMI for a private service like this is 1) too complicated and 2) too expensive for a single user. The user experience could be streamlined fairly easily, but the footprint is too big without something like Docker.

[BGyss]

You described most of the goals of Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/). I don't think they've really landed on the right user experience yet but I imagine they're definitely working towards improving it.

[robszumski]

If they were going to get into the hosting business, they wouldn't have sold off the old dotCloud, which was/is a hosting business.

[rmac]

so if not hosting, care to speculate how docker is going to make $? Enterprise support / services?

Maybe a premium docker repo (mentioned above), where you pay for ... something?

How about competing directly with quay.io but they link up all the networking pieces for you automatically? a docker sdn! :P

[nickstinemates]

No speculation needed. Quick rundown

1) Paid Support (B2B, B2B2C)

2) Docker Hub Private functionality, on-prem offering

3) Services engagements through a set of SI partners, 10 of which we announced at DockerCon US

Happy to answer more questions along this line.

[jchonphoenix]

Founder @ Koality here. As far as "how do we make sustainable money," that's part of the reason we're at Docker now. We're not planning on being a hosting company.

There's quite a bit that's misleading/not quite correct in the TC article, but we definitely have a solid plan in place for sustainability.

[skrebbel]

Fig wasn't a company. It is an open source project by the people behind Orchard, so you're listing them twice.

[nickstinemates]

I think we've been fairly clear. Quick rundown

1) Paid Support (B2B, B2B2C)

2) Docker Hub Private functionality, on-prem offering

3) Services engagements through a set of SI partners, 10 of which we announced at DockerCon US

Happy to answer more questions along this line.