The real problem was the downright hostility towards everyone outside of Docker... with shykes (Solomon Hykes) leading the belligerent charge on the community at large. The countless arguments shykes got into with potential users right here on HN, and all the new fake accounts that would suddenly crop up to defend his positions. It was transparently an attempt to wield HN as a weapon against anyone that questioned what Docker was doing.

Starting with the outright lies about what Docker could or could not do (Docker does X, Y, and Z - but Y and Z were actually still in development), to the outright refusal to play nice with the open source community (remember the Docker vs. CoreOS fights for standardization of container formats?). If Docker didn't invent it, or think of it first, it was a terrible idea and had to die.

They even went so far as to start a convention before they had a production product.

Then Kubernetes, Rocket and all the other container platforms and tooling came along and ate their lunch. Why did people adopt them so quickly? Because they played nice with each other and made it easy to build your system as you wanted it... not just as Docker wanted it.

The entire thing was a money grab. And when things went sideways, they made some terrible decisions (the entire Moby fiasco). It's not surprising Docker finally fell...

Most underrated comment of the thread - this is all exactly right. Hubris and poor leadership were Docker's fail whales not the technology.

> Then Kubernetes, Rocket and all the other container platforms and tooling came along and ate their lunch. Why did people adopt them so quickly?

Because Google of course.

Yes - the unchecked bad attitudes by some of their maintainers is awful. I can't believe there isn't a major fork to docker-compose because of it.

> I can't believe there isn't a major fork to docker-compose because of it.

We don't need one. Red Hat is working on podman.

https://podman.io/

Podman is great! It plays much nicer with the rest of my system and doesn’t require root for things that shouldn’t require root! Additionally (afaik, I don’t really use kubernetes) it maps better into kubernetes models of things with pods and kube.yml etc.

Rootless support has been in BuildKit since 2018. I feel like all of the tools RedHat rebuilt, that didn't really offer anything new and in a lot of cases offered a whole lot less, is centric to very diehard RedHat oriented folks. If anything we should hope that all of the Docker bits stay where they are because I surely trust RedHat far less under IBMs leadership.

And, no. Podman doesn't offer any advantages in the Kubernetes ecosystem by mapping better into k8s "models".