Their enterprise pricing is per node. So if enough companies sign on to this, ever box/VM they put docker on brings Docker Inc. revenue. I'm sure at large scale this will be more of a flat rate negotiated deal ($XX,XXX per year) but still that's a lot of potential cash on the table.
The risk of course is that the nobody will want to pay per-node and the community will just invest in the open source container ecosystem and replicate the Enterprise features with plugins and forks.
Still, the market might be big enough that they can become another Red Hat just based on support and stewardship revenue.
Becoming another Redhat wouldn't be enough to justify investment at this valuation though would it? They need an upside potential 5 to 10x higher than Redhat's current valuation.
Well, valuation is a gamble. You can try to justify the potential growth. The tech community is embracing the adoption and maturity of container-based CI/CD deployment. In the end, some number trick is done, higher valuation is posted, investors (new and old) are going nuts. Some months later, the big guy cash out large of the initial buying and move on to the hot baby in town.
There are enough things I find as a company user annoying about docker to make me suspect some company will help fund the community fork. We are not quite there, but if docker keeps making changes that break us.
The risk of course is that the nobody will want to pay per-node and the community will just invest in the open source container ecosystem and replicate the Enterprise features with plugins and forks.
Still, the market might be big enough that they can become another Red Hat just based on support and stewardship revenue.