That's an understandable criticism, even though it makes me want to die inside. Let me try and explain my point of view, and why this whole situation is so frustrating to me.
First, my impression is that I do spend most of my days listening to criticism by people smarter than me, revisiting my assumptions, and trying very hard to make people feel appreciated for their effort in the process. Most of that effort is spent on IRC, the Docker repository, and the Docker mailing lists (in decreasing order of time invested). Obviously, I am biased. But I'm willing to bet that if you spent a week or 2 on the IRC channel interacting with me and the other maintainers, you would develop an entirely different picture of how we work and how we treat criticism.
Second: aggressive blog posts by competitors and their coverage in Hacker News. This is something new to me, and I acknowledge that I have been handling it very poorly. I thought I had learned my lesson last time, but as your message points out, it appears I have not. Basically, I handle very badly the combination of 1) feigned indignation and ignorance by people with clear conflicts of interest; 2) a small number of vocal haters waiting for an opportunity to pile on, and 3) lots of intelligent but uninformed bystanders. When someone makes a valid criticism, with the ultimate goal of improving the project, as harsh as it is, I will be the first to embrace it. But here we are talking about something different: a blog post written by commercial competitors, with the intent of making the project look as bad as possible - using valid known criticism when available, but not shying away from recycling old criticism which has since been addressed, or sometimes making up facts altogether - resulting in a more compelling narrative that will "stick" better. These are posts crafted by venture-backed companies competing with Docker, inc. in the same general space (developer and IT tools), with all sorts of conflicts of interests. I now these people personally, they are all part of the Silicon Valley scene, and what they do is very intentional. It has nothing to do with honest criticism or attempts to improve the project - those are taking place all day long on the repo, and never generate any drama. It's just business as usual, but as an engineer it drives me crazy. What drives me most crazy is how easily people fall for it. But, I acknowledge that it's not an excuse for the sort of knee-jerk reactions I've engaged in. As frustrating as it is, I think the proper reaction would be to 1) stay under the radar, wait for the drama to die down; 2) take a solid look at the criticism, extract the real one from the political bs, and focus on fixing that; 3) take a solid look at how well we communicate what we do. For example, we have made good progress on security compared to 6 months ago, but clearly we have done a poor job at explaining that and showing solid proof points. 4) as outrageously hypocritical and unfair as these posts appear to me, who know the full back story and understand the commercial motivations, remember that the rest of the world is not aware of the commercial back story. And frankly, they don't care. What they'll remember is our response to the criticism.
So - I did my best to express my point of view on all this. My personal lesson is that success is not that fun, and sometimes I regret the days when Docker was not successful. But at the same time there is a sense of responsibility: a great many people use this tool every day, and we are responsible for improving those tools every day. Once these vc-backed competitors (whether it's coreos or flynn) are done writing their blog posts, they aren't going to fix the project. That's our responsibility, and nothing else should matter.
So, for what it's worth, my new year's resolution will be to do a better job at the above - and perhaps take a break from Hacker News altogether, too ;) Feel free to join the IRC channel if you want to discuss this some more. In the open, of course!
You make some good points (and I genuinely appreciate the long and well-thought-out reply, honest), but two things stand out to me:
First, a blog post is only aggressive if you let it be. I can set up a blog and sit around shitting on Docker all day long, and in fact, the entire Hollywood ecosystem is built around that crap. There's blog posts about my current and former employers that make my stomach turn. One guy in particular has written essays about how a former employer is anti-Semitic, and they're basically all made up. My root point is just to be above it. If you want Docker to succeed, it's more effective to prove those blog posters wrong than to tell them they're wrong, you dig? Talk is cheap. "You missed this part of the announcement" is just throwing contempt around, fixing the issue is just better in every way.
The second point is I get your contempt for CoreOS and Flynn, but calling them VC-backed and swiping at them didn't help. You're VC-backed too, and you know that, so I'm left confused by your general tone on that. You're also not going to score many friends on Hacker News by contempt for the VC ecosystem, which is how that read (and apologies if I was wrong there). The us-versus-them stuff that I see you do, that included, is a pretty strong signal regarding coming to work for you, so for every asshole that won't shut up like me, imagine all the silent people reading your remarks and quietly coming to conclusions.
All in all, thank you for the reply, and I'm glad you're at least thinking about how to be better on this.
On the vc-backed point, i should have been more specific. There is nothing wrong with being vc-backed. However there has been a deliberate attempt at crafting a narrative of "docker is expanding feature scope because it is vc-backed therefore greedy an untrustworthy". That narrative is pushed by competitors who are also vc-backed, making the whole thing quite ridiculous. Yet somehow it sticks. It's very disheartening given the enormous focus on cleanly layering company success on top of project success.
Anyway, you are right. Time to focus on fixing the actual issues and ignoring the rest.
No, thank you. You gained a lot of respect back just by listening and taking it to heart.
By the way, I totally get you. I'm the same way. If someone's wrong, damn my position, I want to tell them. It's damaging to a deep layer when people are wrong about your work, especially when you believe in it very strongly. I compared you to caker earlier and he and I went twenty rounds about decisive, honest response to some of the criticism. One thing he's good at, to his credit, is knowing when not to respond (usually). I'm still learning that.
First, my impression is that I do spend most of my days listening to criticism by people smarter than me, revisiting my assumptions, and trying very hard to make people feel appreciated for their effort in the process. Most of that effort is spent on IRC, the Docker repository, and the Docker mailing lists (in decreasing order of time invested). Obviously, I am biased. But I'm willing to bet that if you spent a week or 2 on the IRC channel interacting with me and the other maintainers, you would develop an entirely different picture of how we work and how we treat criticism.
Second: aggressive blog posts by competitors and their coverage in Hacker News. This is something new to me, and I acknowledge that I have been handling it very poorly. I thought I had learned my lesson last time, but as your message points out, it appears I have not. Basically, I handle very badly the combination of 1) feigned indignation and ignorance by people with clear conflicts of interest; 2) a small number of vocal haters waiting for an opportunity to pile on, and 3) lots of intelligent but uninformed bystanders. When someone makes a valid criticism, with the ultimate goal of improving the project, as harsh as it is, I will be the first to embrace it. But here we are talking about something different: a blog post written by commercial competitors, with the intent of making the project look as bad as possible - using valid known criticism when available, but not shying away from recycling old criticism which has since been addressed, or sometimes making up facts altogether - resulting in a more compelling narrative that will "stick" better. These are posts crafted by venture-backed companies competing with Docker, inc. in the same general space (developer and IT tools), with all sorts of conflicts of interests. I now these people personally, they are all part of the Silicon Valley scene, and what they do is very intentional. It has nothing to do with honest criticism or attempts to improve the project - those are taking place all day long on the repo, and never generate any drama. It's just business as usual, but as an engineer it drives me crazy. What drives me most crazy is how easily people fall for it. But, I acknowledge that it's not an excuse for the sort of knee-jerk reactions I've engaged in. As frustrating as it is, I think the proper reaction would be to 1) stay under the radar, wait for the drama to die down; 2) take a solid look at the criticism, extract the real one from the political bs, and focus on fixing that; 3) take a solid look at how well we communicate what we do. For example, we have made good progress on security compared to 6 months ago, but clearly we have done a poor job at explaining that and showing solid proof points. 4) as outrageously hypocritical and unfair as these posts appear to me, who know the full back story and understand the commercial motivations, remember that the rest of the world is not aware of the commercial back story. And frankly, they don't care. What they'll remember is our response to the criticism.
So - I did my best to express my point of view on all this. My personal lesson is that success is not that fun, and sometimes I regret the days when Docker was not successful. But at the same time there is a sense of responsibility: a great many people use this tool every day, and we are responsible for improving those tools every day. Once these vc-backed competitors (whether it's coreos or flynn) are done writing their blog posts, they aren't going to fix the project. That's our responsibility, and nothing else should matter.
So, for what it's worth, my new year's resolution will be to do a better job at the above - and perhaps take a break from Hacker News altogether, too ;) Feel free to join the IRC channel if you want to discuss this some more. In the open, of course!