
Docker Raises $15M - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/21/docker-raises-15m-for-popular-open-source-platform-designed-for-developers-to-build-apps-in-the-cloud/
======
shykes
Hey everybody, Solomon from team Docker. We're all lurking here and are happy
to answer questions.

Just so you know I conzider Hacker News to be a key part in Docker's success.
Your feedback, both positive and negative, made us feel like we weren't crazy
and were building something that mattered. I hope in the end you will feel we
live up to the expectations :)

We have lots of really cool things in store this year, I hope you will like
them.

Happy hacking on behalf of the entire Docker team and contributors.

~~~
yapcguy
Congratulations...

So what's the $15m going to be used for?

Given that Docker is licensed under Apache 2.0 which allows the venture backed
Docker Corp. to create a closed proprietary version of the software... will
outside contributors be compensated?

Is this the reason why Docker isn't GPL?

~~~
golubbe
This is Ben, the CEO of Docker, and Solomon's partner in crime. Being based on
Apache 2.0 (and adopting an open design process, having a large number of non-
Docker Inc. maintainers, having over 300 contributors) should be read as a
strong signal that we will _not_ go proprietary or even "open core." _Anyone_
can use and modify Docker under Apache 2.0 without fear of "copyleft" or
similar restrictions, which creates a strong disincentive for us to abuse our
position by going proprietary. Our business plans, as stated in the blog, are
around commercial support and hosted services. (In addition, being Apache vs.
GPL makes it much easier for enterprises to adopt us, and much easier to get
integrated into projects like OpenStack.)

------
galenko
Not to take away from Docker's achievements (seriously, well done), but it's a
funny world we live in, Docker gets 15M (or "another startup casually gets
$XXM), while OpenBSD foundation (which pays for stuff all of us rely on every
day) have to beg for donations and 100k is a huge achievement.

~~~
shykes
I'm really glad you brought this up! This topic is actually very relevant to
what we're trying to do with Docker.

Think of it this way: we (the creators of an open-source project) have built
for our project an infrastructure capable of supporting its long-term
development and success without falling victim to the "openbsd effect". We
hijacked for ourselves a venture-backed company and are experimenting with a
symbiotic relationship where both the project and the business win without
corrupting each other. We get financial, legal and marketing "artillery" in
the form of a corporate structure which is dedicated to the success of the
project without distorting it. We have large stakeholder (me) who is also the
maintainer of the open-source project. We have a CEO (Ben Golub) with a track
record of incredible success in general, of successfully managing an open-
source company in particular and with a reputation of doing business in an
honest and trustworthy way. We have investors with a track record of being
patient, seeing the big picture and backing open-source companies and their
creators in a sincere way. These guys could have fired me at any point of our
transition to this model, and didn't.

So, sure, we got money " _casually_ " (I'll leave that battle for another
day), and OpenBSD struggled to get basic funding. And obviously, OpenBSD and
Docker are not in the same league as open-source projects (although I hope one
day they will be).

But, respectfully, I think this is more than "another startup gets $XXM". We
are experimenting with a new model for the funding of open-source. One where
the original innovators get to capture some of the value they created, fueling
even more innovation in a virtuous circle of "innovation -> better product ->
more money -> more innovation".

To me personally, were we to succeed, that would be a welcome change from the
current situation, where the initial inventors are trampled by savvier
entrepreneurs, who race to the local maximum of the most profitable derivative
business model with the highest barriers to entry, and proceed to _not_
reinvest their profits in the original invention, thwarting the virtuous
circle. For example, Xensource produced the open-source hypervisor and we got
Amazon EC2. Linus produced Git and we got Github. I think these products are
great and useful - but they are a local maximum. With the raw material of git,
hypervisors and a commodity open-source operating system, we could have
produced so much more aggregate wealth!

At Docker we want to be both git and github. We're open-source people first,
but we know how to sell a saas product and run it at scale. We know how to
raise money and build a profitable business with that money. And that profit
gets directly reinvested in the original innovation - Docker.

And I think that's the future of open-source: if we as a community want to see
less "OpenBSD episodes", we're going to have to roll up our sleeves and go
about building real business value on top of our inventions. Otherwise others
will, and we'll only have ourselves to blame.

~~~
galenko
Shykes, I understand how I sounded, but I meant absolutely no offence to your
achievement as a team. You absolutely deserve the money and even in my little
world you're not "just another startup" as I'm a huge fan of docker and
believe it's the future.

"Casually" is more of an observation of HN, as not a day goes by without
someone getting millions in funding, but I'm aware of how not casual the whole
approach to getting that much bank is and how much work is actually involved.

docker does in fact live in the real world and play by its rules, it's not a
bad thing, objectively, only an idiot wouldn't. If you play your cards right,
you'll make money, won't ever need to beg for donations and will do just fine
becoming the new standard.

OpenBSD tries to live in an idea, which is close to my heart and I imagine
close to anyone, who grew up toying with kernels and working on distros. The
recent donation thing was like a reminder that Santa's not real and there is
no magical fairy land, where just putting your head down and doing what you
believe is the right thing for the benefit of everyone, without thinking about
money, will be rewarded.

~~~
shykes
No offense taken whatsoever. I agree it's an important and unsolved topic, and
I myself still have a few old OpenBSD posters from my teenage years :)

Having grown up in a family of "starving artists" like they say, I see a lot
of parallels between open-source development and, say, music, painting,
dancing etc. There are many people who produce art as a "gift" to society,
without financial motives. This almost always comes with a tension between the
quality and intensity of your work and how you will earn a living. Perhaps you
have the luxury of not requiring payment for your work, because you have
another source of income - but then you might be limited in the time and
energy you can invest in your art. Or conversely, you wish to focus your
entire time and energy on your work, but find out that securing funding from
your artistic work (whether royalties, donations, salary or grants) quickly
becomes a job of its own - it is common for artists to feel that the grind of
securing money for their work has become their primary job. Some discover they
have a knack for it, or just get lucky, and find immense commercial success.
There is a commonly held notion that commercial success is inversely
proportional to intrinsic artistic value. But of course it's hard to know for
sure since that is such a subjective thing to measure. Is Justin Bieber's art
"less good" than the local rock band I watched last night? It depends who you
ask :)

So why is it difficult for artists, sometimes immensely talented and
critically appreciated artists, to secure funding? Obviously a complex and
immense question. In some societies the notion of paying someone for art is
inexistant, because everyone produces art on a daily basis as part of their
culture. In our society, it is accepted to pay for art as a service, but only
to a point, and following rules that can be hard to decipher because they rely
on guessing other people's emotions, like fashion or the capital markets.

At the end of the day, I think part of the problem is that art, like writing
open-source code, is an enjoyable activity. People like to do it. Many people
turn out to be good at it. Some people even _pay_ for the privilege of doing
it. Which means it will always be a buyer's market.

------
patio11
That's exciting. I looked at Docker briefly, and it has the "Ooh, cool
project, can envision the potential" bit in spades but unfortunately is at
that unhappy stage of maturity where e.g. betting AR's future on it not
blowing up or shutting down would be a bit more risky than the benefits
currently warrant. I'm really looking forward to when it's production-ready.

~~~
shykes
In addition to the funding, we have bet on a Linux-style development model
where the project is not just open source but open design: ownership is
federated across key individuals with strong ownership over particular
subsystems, with very low barriers to entry and a diversity of employers.

This is one of the reasons Red Hat felt comfortable betting on it so quickly -
and you should expect other major industry players to folluw suit this year :)

~~~
patio11
That's awesome, and I can respect that you're trying to tell me "We are trying
to make Docker the project survivable even in the event of Docker, Inc ceasing
to operate as a going concern.", and I have much less stringent requirements
for maturity than the Fortune 500, but...

As one geek to another, the thing which stops me from Dockering up my entire
infrastructure in February is that: of that NxN compatibility matrix that
Docker will some day liberate me from, I feel like I'm going to be the first
production system in a lot of the cells, I will have to replace my existing
cobbled-together infrastructure which I know to be borderline functional with
hand-rolled work to Dockerize it, and I figure that when there are inevitably
bugs I will be the one to weep tears of blood about them.

When this is no longer true, I'm so there.

~~~
speleding
I'm in the same boat: I think this has huge potential but with my skill set it
would not be wise for my company to be a trailblazer on ops.

@shykes: What would convince me is one or two blog posts from respected
members of the community (patio11 comes to mind :-) where they detail a
successful transition to use Docker in their infrastructure.

~~~
nickstinemates
This is something we're working on. Right now Docker is successful in projects
and companies who want to be on the ground floor of revolutionary product and
have the capacity to invest in / contribute time to dealing with maturing
technology.

Not all companies have the benefit of being in such a position, and we're
working hard to make Docker adoption a possibility there by offering Services
(through partners) and Support (through us) around it.

We will not be the ones to make the judgement of when we've hit that level of
maturity, but we will be publishing use cases / white papers / details about
people who believe we have.

What I would encourage you to do is to start thinking about it _and_ take
advantage of the fact that we have a vested interest in making your project
successful. Get in touch, tell us about your needs, and help make Docker
better by making sure your use case is on track for being rock solid.

------
losvedir
I've been watching this Docker excitement with interest, and went through the
little demo thing on their website (which was quite cool!), but still have
trouble connecting the dots on how exactly I'd use it.

I run your standard Heroku/PG/RoR web-stack app. Is anyone else using Docker
in that environment? I was vaguely thinking we could set up a Vagrant + Docker
combo for our development team to manage dependencies of gems and native apps
and whatnot. Is that how Docker is used? Would getting set up on Docker now
make an eventual transition to, say, AWS or self-hosting later easier?

I'd love to hear examples from how people with a similar tech stack are using
Docker.

~~~
tonyhb
Yeah, the Vagrant + Docker use case is how I'm using it. This is the flow that
I'm pushing my company to use:

* CoreOS/Vagrant

* Docker containers with basic infrastructure (eg LAMP/Ruby+Postgres)

* Containers 'forked' for each client (and company project)

* Central container repo for the team to use

As soon as CoreOS is ready for production we're going to look at using it for
deployment.

We might not be using it 100% correctly, but so far it's nothing short of
amazing. The basic 'git for OS' flow I get out if it makes me smile every
time. Dockerfiles are way, way, way easier than Chef, Puppet or Ansibke, and
the central repo is a synch to picture and imagine in comparison.

~~~
mechanical_fish
So, you're not running Docker in production at this point?

Are you putting the whole stack in one big container and running one container
per Vagrant VM? Or are you spreading a client stack across multiple
containers?

------
unohoo
Congrats Docker team. Docker is an amazing product and I've been following it
closely as well as playing with the latest version. Not one bit of the hype is
vaporware. Cant wait for it to get a little more production ready. I'm sure
anyone who has done even a small amount of dev-ops can appreciate what a huge
pain point docker will solve. VM's have been commoditized, but with docker,
they can be obliterated altogether.

One question I have for Solomon -- do you guys have a product roadmap on the
site anywhere ? As in, what features are planned etc. and by what release/time
?

~~~
jamtur01
This blog post on the road to Docker 1.0 will also give you an idea of what we
have planned albeit the timelines might be a little different:
[http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/getting-to-
docker-1-0/](http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/getting-to-docker-1-0/).

------
druska
This is one of those few projects that everyone is really excited about.
Docker will change many aspects of software development for the better.

------
lquist
A friend of mine recently asked me "I'm looking for a job. If my only
criterion (it isn't) was which companies are most likely to 10x in value in a
few years, which companies would those be?"

My answer was Docker and Oculus VR.

------
ed_blackburn
Just need to persuade Microsoft to add the container facility to the Windows
Kernel now...

Seriously, if MS can be persuaded that this appraoch is beneficial for their
ecosystem too, then everyone is a winner!

~~~
teh_klev
Though not quite the same, IIS application pool isolation (separate app pool
and worker process for each website - which is the default from IIS7+) gets
you a bit of the way there. This has improved security, performance and
reliability massively for us.

But yes, speaking as a shared webhoster devops kinda guy, I agree, it would be
nice to have containers on Windows too.

------
bevenky
Great to see a YC company raise the next round with an open source pivot.
Would be interesting to see how this pans out.

Great job Solomon and team. I am all for you guys!

------
alexismp
The Apache 2 license is great and using a DCO sounds great. Is the project
Governance documented somewhere? Congrats on the amazing achievements so far!

~~~
nickstinemates
Yes, check out CONTRIBUTING.md in the root of the Docker project.

~~~
alexismp
thanks but I was more hoping for something describing the process used to
decide if/how/when to incorporate pull requests, roadmap, software quality
before releasing, ... Do maintainers discuss to reach consensus, do they vote,
something else?

It could be that this is all Docker Inc's prerogative, which is fine. I just
don't see it spelled out.

~~~
shykes
Check out
[https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/hack/MAINTAIN...](https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/hack/MAINTAINERS.md)

And in general the rest of that _hack /_ directory. We use a process that is
completely open and not at all limited to Docker, inc. Several core
maintainers (and countless contributors) are not employed at Docker inc.

Generally speaking the reference for how we organize is Linux.

~~~
alexismp
thanks, this clarifies it!

------
xissy
Sometimes I've thought what might be the next GitHub. The answer is Docker.
Can't imagine to develop, test and deploy without Docker totally.

------
davidw
So... I'm quite sleep deprived due to a sick kid (nothing serious) and haven't
really followed Docker much in any case.

Why would I "Dockerize" my infrastructure, and what benefits and challenges
does that entail? I mostly do fairly simple RoR web apps that run on something
like Linode.

~~~
calgaryeng
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+use+docker](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=why+use+docker)

~~~
davidw
That's not a very helpful reply, really, as a lot of the first hits on Google
are kind of vague, and I have no idea whether the whole thing really applies
to what I do in any case.

------
nikita
Congratulations Solomon and the team. We use docker every day. Thanks for all
your hard work!

------
veesahni
Excited to see Docker's rapid climb. This is the right product at the right
time.

------
hkmurakami
Awesome to see them doing well and excited to see what they do with the extra
ammo :)

------
voltagex_
Congratulations to the Docker team and contributors!

------
kclay
That was quick, Congratulations.

------
xiaohanzhang14
Am I the only one who thought this article was gonna be about chinos?

------
jamtur01
Woot! Very excited! :)

------
steeve
Well done guys :)

------
nickstinemates
Very exciting!

------
dclara
Well accepted.

