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**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. It doesn't seem like you would just do this blindly, considering what you've shared with us, which is why we kind of began with the nostalgia; you put a lot of care into moving to Docker in the first place, so clearly you would take the same amount of care when transitioning to Moby. |
**Solomon Hykes:** We did, but I think we made a few tactical mistakes along the way. It could have been smoother. I'm not gonna go into the whole back-story, but I think we made a few miscalculations. The big picture is it's day one, and what matters is how many contributions will continue to flow and how healthy will... |
I think, honestly, we're gonna look back in six months and think of it as a blip in the radar. What matters is the next six months, how well we execute... I've done a lot of launches; no launches go well. There's always something that goes wrong. Here I think what went wrong - just to pick a few details, a few examples... |
\[44:09\] We invested a lot in talking to the maintainers of the project. That's a very small group - it's less than 50 that actually have commit rights on the project or on one of the components of the project. |
I started an email thread with them about two months before the announcement, talking about the tension between Docker as an open source product and Docker as an open source project... The fact that the communities around these two (the product and the project) are different, they have different expectations, they have... |
On the other end, we invested in making sure it would not disrupt our users and our customers. Anyone using Docker, we wanted to make sure they would not be affected, and also how would they understand the change to Moby. So we spent a lot of time crafting a story that would be understandable for the mainstream, and I ... |
From the point of someone who's using Docker we're saying, "Hey, we're making a change in how Docker is produced under the hood, and if you're interested, here's a high-level explanation of what that means for you and why it's good." That's what we optimized for and that's the story we told at the keynote at DockerCon.... |
So we did these two things, and then I think the mistake we made is that we underestimated this sort of middle population, which is a lot of people that go on our GitHub repo, that are involved in the open source projects but very superficially; they're not active committers. They're not stewards of the project, but th... |
Our plan was "Let's announce our intention, let's move the repo in a new place, and then let's invite the community to come and help us execute on the change together to be more open and let's see what happens", and I guess what happened is there was extreme confusion and anger at the change, for a while. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It felt like a band-aid being ripped off. |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah, I think so, but we were hoping for -- again, another point of context... Sorry, I'm rambling a little bit... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, that's okay. |
**Solomon Hykes:** A lot of the criticism from the open source contributor community - a subset of it - was that we started at some point behaving more like a product... Docker started being more like a company-driven product than a community-driven project. I talked about this conflict, this override between Docker th... |
\[48:05\] The typical example of that when we had the conversation is the announcement of Docker 1.12, when we rolled out built-in orchestration. That pissed off a lot of contributors for two reasons. One, we didn't warn them; we developed it in secret at Docker, and then we rolled it out, which is a typical thing to d... |
The other reason people were pissed off is we did not use Kubernetes for that feature. There's a subset of people who contribute to Docker who are also contributing to Kubernetes and are big fans of that project, and they got really pissed off at us that we didn't use their project... How dare we? Which, by the way, I ... |
Anyway, my point is because we got so criticized for that, for doing things behind closed doors and polishing it completely before we released it, we thought "Hey, with Moby let's do the opposite. Let's make the bare minimum viable change" - which was moving the repo from one org to the next - and make no other changes... |
We thought we were being super-nice by making things super-open and involving everyone, but in fact I think we confused the hell out of a lot of people. So anyway... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But maybe it's true... Our production shipment was broken for a few days because of the name change... I think there's one question in the chat there, which is "Why were so many people \[unintelligible 00:49:59.06\]" I think it may have just been simply docker/docker versus moby/moby... One change, ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Actually, very few things were actually broken. I think we had a glitch in the redirects, but basically, everything that was broken was mildly broken and fixed within the day. Everything else was really confusion, mostly at the fact that we moved the repository - docker/docker to moby/moby. That made... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hence the Docker/Xerox comparison, because like "Why change that?" In all honesty, to tell you the reason why we wanted to have this conversation with you here on this show was so that you can share the details of that. I think hearing that now from you, versus a blog post, which is black and white ... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah. Well, thank you, I appreciate that. I think the backfiring, honestly -- on the kind of stuff we've dealt with over the last four years, this was a pretty mild backfire. Right now we're just focused on improving it and focused on the cool things that we can do now that there's Moby. |
\[51:55\] The really cool thing about Moby - separately from the name split - now there's a place for the open source projects and the open source product... The really exciting thing is it allows us to further break up the platform into components, and that's a really important aspect of it, because Moby is not one co... |
If you like Containerd - and Containerd is the core container runtime that does all this, but without carrying any of the additional baggage, the additional opinions of Docker as a platform; so it just runs Linux containers, it's a low-level API to do that, and it's becoming the de facto standard for doing that. So eve... |
We're gonna do the same thing for every single component, so in the end you have these three phases which I drew in this little pencil drawing that you pasted in the chat earlier; we have three phases in the supply chain. All the way upstream we have the individual components, and then that gets integrated into Moby, b... |
Think of it as like a Lego club. You go to the Lego club, there's a giant box with all the pieces you could dream of, and then everyone's hanging out at this big table and everyone's doing their own castle or Thor or whatever, and if you wanna join a group of kids and play with them, you can join the fun... But the poi... |
Docker in this case is like a professional Lego artist, that has a lot of people that just love our Lego creations, but we're gonna come and hang out in the same club as everyone else and we're gonna build our Lego constructions on the same table and collaborate with everyone else, and if someone likes it, they can com... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Maybe we can have you back on the Changelog to talk about that deeper part. It's a shame we had to spend a lot of time here talking about just the name change, because I feel like that's -- it has to be talked about, but we can't talk about the other thing, which is the next six months that you keep... |
You have spent several years defending Docker and this open container spec and you've spent several years trying to do different things, and it seems like this transition, this move is out of a response of several years of flack, so to speak, that you've mentioned a couple of times that you've taken over the years. |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah. Or let's call it constructive feedback. \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go, constructive feedback. Flack was my word... I don't think you directly said that, so I'm not putting words in your mouth. |
**Solomon Hykes:** \[56:04\] The thing to remember is when we started Docker we had open sourced things at DotCloud but never had the scale, right? And also, it was company open source; there was no serious effort in trying to create a community where everyone participating is equal. But Docker, from day one, that was ... |
There are projects, we're not the only one and we're not the largest, we're definitely in the top 0.1%. Just like systems behave differently at large scale and sometimes the rules change - what seemed obvious at a small scale suddenly starts breaking in mysterious ways at large scale; for projects, it's just the same t... |
So part of this is we have to explain things to people who do open source and are very proud of the fact they do open source and they're confident that they know open source - and they do, but they don't know open source at our scale. Now I hear myself, that sounds arrogant, but we have to deal with that, too. Sometime... |
We just try it, and then we try to be responsive. If anyone points out something that's broken, we're always listening, and then we're actively working on fixing it. Internally, we have a culture as a team of always talking about the broken stuff, always talking about the problems, and I think maybe we should do a bett... |
The problem we have though is because we're such a big target, every day we get hundreds of points of feedback; we get criticized over a hundred things, and we have to kind of extract from that giant volume of criticism what is the most important and actionable stuff. To get to that, we need to sort through people who ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I know we only have a couple minutes left in this show... One thing I'm curious about is like here we are now with Moby and the split, and you've alluded a little bit to the next six months... What's your vision for Docker over the next one year, five years? If you had nothing but free time to hack... |
**Solomon Hykes:** Excellent question. \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You stomped him. |
**Solomon Hykes:** Sorry, I was daydreaming about me hacking all day... \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Good one, Solomon. |
**Solomon Hykes:** You know, right now we've got two groups of users that are really excited about Docker and are just pulling for more stuff; there's developers and there's operators. Operators I think just have this massive problem that they need -- they did a new kind of operating system, because it's not individual... |
So you've got large technology companies that have built their own custom distributed operating system, but everyone else is left kind of cobbling together tools and components and adding generous duct tape around it to kind of create sort of an operating system to run their stuff... And we wanna build that. |
\[01:00:23.21\] One thing we've learned is we've tried to build that with DotCloud, the operating system that would run all your things on a distributed system. What we've learned is you can't build that in a monolithic way; you have to build that in a modular way, so that's what we're doing. We're either building the ... |
The other one is development. There's a lot of people out there that have a lot of cool ideas and they wanna build something with code, and it's still too hard. Honestly, I feel like we've regressed since the times of Basic, or Excel formulas. Those were incredible leaps forward in terms of making programming useable b... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Or SQL. |
**Solomon Hykes:** SQL was pretty cool, but you still had to plug into other things, right? But I guess you're right, you can express something, interaction with data. Yeah, actually SQL goes in that list, for sure. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, before then you had to write your own storage layers and how you were gonna retrieve and do this stuff, and that really made it more approachable at a much higher level of \[unintelligible 01:01:41.24\] |
**Solomon Hykes:** Yeah. So for us, because Docker now is really this kind of beacon for a lot of developers who wanna build something and they just have all these problems and they need tools to solve these problems, so they come to us and they tell us "Hey, I would like to do this... Can you help me?" And honestly, s... |
So I just wanna make things easier for developers. Honestly, I think we're at the very beginning of that... And I don't mean just Docker. I mean as a community of people who make tools for others, we've got a lot of work to do. I think we've gotta raise the bar; we're not doing a good enough job. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So I think we're basically right at the tail end; we might be a couple minutes over... But there were a couple of questions, and we'll see how many we have time for. One of them was somebody - I think it was Marwin, if I recall - in the GoTime channel had asked that he had read about a change from ... |
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