Docker is not being forked. CoreOS (which is another company, not a "democratic community") is launching a competing project: Rocket, and tries to leverage the popularity of Docker for that.
There is a point to be made about Docker, even though it hasn't been forked. The prevailing sentiment in yesterday's thread about the new Docker announcements was one of worry over whether it was too much of a land grab by the people at Docker, Inc and whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology but will almost certainly do so at some point in the future.
But what were seeing with Node along with the other examples from the post you're replying to is that so long as the source is freely available, the core developers and the community is what's important. There was a quote in yesterday's thread that 95% of Docker contributors don't work for Docker, Inc. This means that Docker, Inc will need to walk a tightrope between over-monetizing their platform, pissing off the 95% of contributors from outside Docker, Inc and under-monetizing it, pissing off their investors. If they try things that lock people into the platform and force them to pay for other Docker products, you'll see the developer community rebel with an actual fork of the Docker codebase. This is exactly what we're seeing here with Node...Joyent's stewardship of the project is being seen as lacking and the people who are really important, the core developers and the community are taking a proactive step to remedy that.
It think we're nowhere near the point where this will happen to Docker, but this should be an object lesson for Docker, Inc about what can happen if they try to push too much of the Docker, Inc agenda into Docker, the open source project.
> whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology
We trusted free software for a long time before we needed to call it open source to make it sound palatable to less visionary business leaders.
We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the people they've amassed to work on the FOSS. Those people can continue to work on the FOSS after the company disolves, because the osftware is open/free.
>We'll go on trusting the FOSS. The free and open nature of it means that we're never really trusting the company (the corporate entity) just the people they've amassed to work on the FOSS. Those people can continue to work on the FOSS after the company disolves, because the osftware is open/free.
If they aren't volunteers doing it for fun, though, they wont, unless someone pays them.
And even some very popular FOSS projects millions of people use have just one or two overworked maintainers and not much in the way of funding or contributions.
So FOSS is no magic bullet "as long as the code is open and there are users the project will be worked on".
But what were seeing with Node along with the other examples from the post you're replying to is that so long as the source is freely available, the core developers and the community is what's important. There was a quote in yesterday's thread that 95% of Docker contributors don't work for Docker, Inc. This means that Docker, Inc will need to walk a tightrope between over-monetizing their platform, pissing off the 95% of contributors from outside Docker, Inc and under-monetizing it, pissing off their investors. If they try things that lock people into the platform and force them to pay for other Docker products, you'll see the developer community rebel with an actual fork of the Docker codebase. This is exactly what we're seeing here with Node...Joyent's stewardship of the project is being seen as lacking and the people who are really important, the core developers and the community are taking a proactive step to remedy that.
It think we're nowhere near the point where this will happen to Docker, but this should be an object lesson for Docker, Inc about what can happen if they try to push too much of the Docker, Inc agenda into Docker, the open source project.