
​Docker has a business plan headache - CrankyBear
http://www.zdnet.com/article/docker-has-a-business-plan-headache/
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huslage
This article gives no evidence for its viewpoint and gets a number of things
wrong. Docker is doing fine. Red Hat didn't buy CoreOS for Tectonic.
Kubernetes won, so what. There is a big pie out there and there are multiple
ways to slice it up. There will NEVER be a clear-cut "Winner" in this space,
there will be multiple companies doing multiple things and all making lots of
money doing them.

~~~
spaceflunky
Docker is "doing fine" in terms of user adoption, but they are not doing fine
in terms of revenue acquisition.

I think this speaks to a larger problem of open-source business models in the
IT world. What happens is some person makes neat tool to address some neat.
It's open-source (read free), a bunch of people adopt it because free, a
community takes off, and then the owner of the open-source project starts
scrambling to find a way to make money off it.

While some OSS businesses have figured out revenue models, most struggle. For
example, think of all the DevOps tools out there that are popular but have
shit business models. Chef is hugely popular, but I suspect they haven't IPO'd
because their revenue looks like shit compared to their actual usage numbers.

If you can think of a decent business model for open-source projects, I'd like
to hear it haha :) The go-to model has usually been "let's offer support" or
"let's offer some premium features" or "let's limit # of users, etc. until you
pay", but those business models usually don't work out that well.

The bottom line is it's extremely hard to build a popular open-source tool,
but it's doubly hard to then transition that popular tool into a revenue model
that doesn't cause your users to revolt. So a lot of these companies end up
fighting a two-front war they can't win.

~~~
paulddraper
I think it's mostly one front war.

By numbers, adoption is far, far easier for open source tools than closed
sourced (Sublime, VS Code -- vs -- Intellij, Resharper).

 __ _Adoption is the reason business open source._ __

It 's hard to have a product that is expensive and popular. Unsurprisingly.

