Not to take away from Docker's achievements (seriously, well done), but it's a funny world we live in, Docker gets 15M (or "another startup casually gets $XXM), while OpenBSD foundation (which pays for stuff all of us rely on every day) have to beg for donations and 100k is a huge achievement.
I feel similarly. Docker's founders deserve only congratulations, they're doing a cool thing and asking for money for it. And Linux's terrible and primitive containerization technologies are finally growing up to be able to match Solaris and FreeBSD. But I don't find "funny" strong enough a word when OpenBSD, which is IMHO a far more fundamental and important technology than containerization and should be easier to monetize than Docker, is struggling to survive.
I think it comes down to the personalities of the leadership, and where they want to take the projects. But it's a crying shame that OpenBSD is struggling. Not related at all to Docker, but a shame none the less.
I can give 100k to docker and expect to get back 200k.
If I give that money to OpenBSD I'm expecting a general "the world may be better" and a loss of 100k.
While a nice thing, this is not what I'd want people managing my money to do.
I think that with the proper service infrastructure on top of their open source development model, OpenBSD could also bring in 200k on a 100k investment. But OpenBSD would have to be pushed and marketed as Docker has been, and the service side organized as a for-profit organization.
I'm really glad you brought this up! This topic is actually very relevant to what we're trying to do with Docker.
Think of it this way: we (the creators of an open-source project) have built for our project an infrastructure capable of supporting its long-term development and success without falling victim to the "openbsd effect". We hijacked for ourselves a venture-backed company and are experimenting with a symbiotic relationship where both the project and the business win without corrupting each other. We get financial, legal and marketing "artillery" in the form of a corporate structure which is dedicated to the success of the project without distorting it. We have large stakeholder (me) who is also the maintainer of the open-source project. We have a CEO (Ben Golub) with a track record of incredible success in general, of successfully managing an open-source company in particular and with a reputation of doing business in an honest and trustworthy way. We have investors with a track record of being patient, seeing the big picture and backing open-source companies and their creators in a sincere way. These guys could have fired me at any point of our transition to this model, and didn't.
So, sure, we got money "casually" (I'll leave that battle for another day), and OpenBSD struggled to get basic funding. And obviously, OpenBSD and Docker are not in the same league as open-source projects (although I hope one day they will be).
But, respectfully, I think this is more than "another startup gets $XXM". We are experimenting with a new model for the funding of open-source. One where the original innovators get to capture some of the value they created, fueling even more innovation in a virtuous circle of "innovation -> better product -> more money -> more innovation".
To me personally, were we to succeed, that would be a welcome change from the current situation, where the initial inventors are trampled by savvier entrepreneurs, who race to the local maximum of the most profitable derivative business model with the highest barriers to entry, and proceed to not reinvest their profits in the original invention, thwarting the virtuous circle. For example, Xensource produced the open-source hypervisor and we got Amazon EC2. Linus produced Git and we got Github. I think these products are great and useful - but they are a local maximum. With the raw material of git, hypervisors and a commodity open-source operating system, we could have produced so much more aggregate wealth!
At Docker we want to be both git and github. We're open-source people first, but we know how to sell a saas product and run it at scale. We know how to raise money and build a profitable business with that money. And that profit gets directly reinvested in the original innovation - Docker.
And I think that's the future of open-source: if we as a community want to see less "OpenBSD episodes", we're going to have to roll up our sleeves and go about building real business value on top of our inventions. Otherwise others will, and we'll only have ourselves to blame.
Shykes, I understand how I sounded, but I meant absolutely no offence to your achievement as a team. You absolutely deserve the money and even in my little world you're not "just another startup" as I'm a huge fan of docker and believe it's the future.
"Casually" is more of an observation of HN, as not a day goes by without someone getting millions in funding, but I'm aware of how not casual the whole approach to getting that much bank is and how much work is actually involved.
docker does in fact live in the real world and play by its rules, it's not a bad thing, objectively, only an idiot wouldn't. If you play your cards right, you'll make money, won't ever need to beg for donations and will do just fine becoming the new standard.
OpenBSD tries to live in an idea, which is close to my heart and I imagine close to anyone, who grew up toying with kernels and working on distros. The recent donation thing was like a reminder that Santa's not real and there is no magical fairy land, where just putting your head down and doing what you believe is the right thing for the benefit of everyone, without thinking about money, will be rewarded.
No offense taken whatsoever. I agree it's an important and unsolved topic, and I myself still have a few old OpenBSD posters from my teenage years :)
Having grown up in a family of "starving artists" like they say, I see a lot of parallels between open-source development and, say, music, painting, dancing etc. There are many people who produce art as a "gift" to society, without financial motives. This almost always comes with a tension between the quality and intensity of your work and how you will earn a living. Perhaps you have the luxury of not requiring payment for your work, because you have another source of income - but then you might be limited in the time and energy you can invest in your art. Or conversely, you wish to focus your entire time and energy on your work, but find out that securing funding from your artistic work (whether royalties, donations, salary or grants) quickly becomes a job of its own - it is common for artists to feel that the grind of securing money for their work has become their primary job. Some discover they have a knack for it, or just get lucky, and find immense commercial success. There is a commonly held notion that commercial success is inversely proportional to intrinsic artistic value. But of course it's hard to know for sure since that is such a subjective thing to measure. Is Justin Bieber's art "less good" than the local rock band I watched last night? It depends who you ask :)
So why is it difficult for artists, sometimes immensely talented and critically appreciated artists, to secure funding? Obviously a complex and immense question. In some societies the notion of paying someone for art is inexistant, because everyone produces art on a daily basis as part of their culture. In our society, it is accepted to pay for art as a service, but only to a point, and following rules that can be hard to decipher because they rely on guessing other people's emotions, like fashion or the capital markets.
At the end of the day, I think part of the problem is that art, like writing open-source code, is an enjoyable activity. People like to do it. Many people turn out to be good at it. Some people even pay for the privilege of doing it. Which means it will always be a buyer's market.
I'll be watching your adventure with keen interest.
I'm also building an open source project that I want to avoid the "openbsd effect" and sustain itself, more like the Linux kernel.
I have a company that I'm using as a vehicle to bootstrap this project. The company sells services and acts as an example for others to start offering similar services (ideally including Redhat etc one day). To play it safe I don't allow the company to have any intellectual property and I don't sell any equity.
The idea of the company as a vehicle rather than an asset has been a powerful one for me.
Happy to chat about it anytime, and please let me know if I can help!
It should go without saying that I don't think this is the only route for supporting open-source. Linux comes to mind as perhaps the most successful open-source project of all time, and it is backed by a non-profit foundation funded by member companies. (for example Docker inc. is a small member of the foundation, so a small fraction of the $15m we raised will pay for a small fraction of the salary of a core linux maintainer).
> We hijacked for ourselves a venture-backed company and are experimenting with a symbiotic relationship where both the project and the business win without corrupting each other.
Well, 15M gives investors control, and (even out over several investments) reasonable likelihood of profit. But, then again, you point out a great idea: to somehow tie large investments and open source projets. I'm not sure entrepreneurs who struggle getting funding would want to had one more stone to their neck, but it would be great PR to have either a repeated entrepreneur, or an accelerator, lock x% of the funds they raise to donation.
Without inside information you have no idea if this is true or not. It may very well not be. Facebook raised over 2 Billion prior to their IPO and never gave up control. $XXm Investment != Control.
100k was a gift with no strings attached and 15M is an investment with planned profits, control etc.
By the way, today's docker user base and importance isn't that small comparing to OpenBSD. At the moment there's 377 people on #openbsd channel and 715 people on #docker channel (freenode).
Very true. Do you think we could take the Gittip model a few steps farther, and have companies use it to fund open source projects they are built on (like OpenBSD)?
Sure, big players like Google contribute to open source projects, but I'm thinking along the lines of smaller companies pledging 50k/year because they rely heavily on ___ open source technology.
I'm not sure that I understand your point -- people place a value on things but that doesn't mean anything that makes less money is any less important.
