Neither of these went down well. RedHat had that market sewn up, and swatted Docker away like an irritating fly.

You seem to have gotten that mixed. It was RedHat that refused to support anything (including their RHEL based images) on the docker platform unless it was run on the Red Hat's franken docker. It was RedHat that chose to not play fair, not Docker.

For a good open source ecosystem, a commission isn't like rent, it is more like taxes.

There's a balance point where paying someone else to debug and ship fixes for your problems approximates Adam Smith's pin factory.

The value part of an enterprise open source system is in turning around fixes fast and debugging on behalf of a customer.

>> taken a commission on every server in existence

As someone who's worked with Rob before, he gets it that you can't really squeeze money out by force.

However, there'll be enough people who pay you to air-drop committers on inexplicable problems & otherwise mostly pay them well to do what they already like doing - ship open source to the community.

But the enterprise version is the open source version. Red Hat just didn't provide the binaries, now they even provide the binaries (since they acquired CentOS). Since White Box Linux, CentOS, and Scientific were started (which was pretty quickly after they launched enterprise Linux), they have been selling per-machine support and 'blame us when it does not work' licenses.

A similar approach may have worked, but it is not a given. Red Hat and SUSE arrived on the market when there we no big open source support companies. Once containerization turned out to be a good idea, the other open source companies could quickly adopt and provide support contracts for the same tech (which they have done).

CentOS can be used for whatever you wish, but that's not a RH binary of course.

That said, it is in RH's best interest to have a free version of RHEL that customers can try out and migrate their workloads to, precisely because it's easy to migrate them to RHEL. So yes, in that sense, there's some relationship.

You're correct though that there's a lot more relationship than I previously thought. Thanks for the link! I'll update my knowledge :).

I'm sure Docker did miss an opportunity to reap profits, but I really don't think there's as easy answer as to how they might have done that.