Docker the tool has been a massive benefit to software development, every now and then I have a moan about the hassle of getting something bootstrapped to run on Docker, but it's still worlds better than the old ways of managing dependencies and making sure everyone on a project is aligned on what versions of things are installed.

Unfortunately Docker the company appears to be dying, this is the latest in a long line of decisions that are clearly being made because they can't work out how to build a business around what is at it's core a nice UI for Linux containers. My hope is that before the inevitable shuttering of Docker Inc another organisations (ideally a coop of some variety, but that's probably wishful thinking) pops up to take over the bits that matter, and then hopefully we can all stop trying to keep up with the latest way in which our workflows have been broken to try and make a few dollars.

I'd like to see Docker succeed. They invented / formalized the space and deserve credit for that. They are probably doing the right thing with some of their development tooling (though maybe that should just be spun off to Microsoft) and ensuring images do not contain badware is something companies will pay for.

However, their core offering must be the leader if they want to survive. Devs must want to use "docker run" instead of "podman run" for example. Docker needs to be the obvious #1 for starting a container on a single machine.

> I'd like to see Docker succeed. They invented / formalized the space and deserve credit for that.

If by succeed, you mean they deserve to have revenue, I disagree.

They spun some cool work out of dotCloud when it failed. They seemed to delay thinking about how they'd monetize the work, and sort of fell into charging for developer tooling after their orchestration play lost to kubernetes.

At this point, I think of Docker the company as a wannabe Oracle. They are desperate for money, and are hoping they can fool you into adopting their tech so they can ransom it from you once you rely on it. If that sounds appealing to you, I'd say go for it.

For me, that situation seems worse than what I do without containers at my disposal. In other words, the solution is worse overall than the problem.