Except that VMware never open sourced VMkernel. That massively contributed to the lack of feature parity between VMware and Microsoft (I'd say VMware was 1-2 years ahead of MSFT). That helps you secure the market in the early years, and what you see as the valuation. Docker Inc is not similar to VMware in that regard.

Docker does not use VMWare, so it's a threat - it's that simple.

Everyone already has containers and had for decades now. Why didn't they buy Sun then?

If by everyone you meant UNIX-derived OSes, it's arguable that they all had containers in one form or another with the exception of Linux which only changed when cgroups [0] were added to the v2.6.24 kernel ~10years ago.

I think that addition to Linux paved the way for containers to enjoy wider adoption than was previously possible with other less popular container tech in OSes like Solaris (zones) or BSD (jails).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cgroups

Only three (of many) Unix-like families have containers, and while Linux was last "to the punch" the others only had them for a few years more. FreeBSD Jails were ready by 2000[1], Solaris Zones were released in 2005[2], and cgroups were merged in 2007. But OpenVZ's containers technology had already existed since 2005, and I would argue that most of the modern Linux "container" infrastructure came from their experiences (plus that of Google). To be fair, cgroups were nowhere near good enough and it took another few years for namespaces to become good enough to be considered "containers".

But my general point is that people talk about Linux as being out-of-touch when it comes to the history of containers, but if you look at the timeline that simply isn't true.

[1]: http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/sane2000-jail.pdf [2]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93....

Sun containers (and AIX, etc) were all very much treated as virtual machines. Docker containers virtualize applications, not OS. That's the key shift.

I'd argue that the key shift (in terms of e.g. configuration management) was from pet to cattle VMs. Application containers are mostly "cattle containers".

Perhaps they eventually would have if the company who currently also owns VirtualBox hadn't done so first.

Unrelated, but at the time virtualbox was owned by Sun :)

ok, it's kind of shocking to me that VMWare is valued at 40B USD. That's a really useful datapoint though. Thanks!

Tons of large enterprises pay VMWare a bunch of money for their products. That's why they're valued at $40B.

Shocking? They do $7B in revenue and ~$1.5B in net income...

Are investors seriously that stupid? VMware doesn't offer open source implementations so they aren't even close to the same class of business.

If containers impact VMware, it's because they are free and most of the revenue will not flow to docker.

It's not about revenue flowing to Docker, it's about revenue no longer flowing to VMWare and thus VMWare having to act (by e.g. buying Docker).

Except that buying Docker will accomplish nothing. The genie is out of the bottle. And VMware is arguably in a better position to profit from it because of their ties to customers.

I don’t know, they have a competing product: https://github.com/vmware/vic

Which is docker for vsphere.