Yeah the tensions were really unfortunate. In the long run it resulted in more competition which benefits all of us; but in the short term it made people’s lives more stressful than they needed to be.
I actually have a slightly different explanation of what set it off. I don’t buy the “docker is suddenly under pressure to make money” explanation. Docker was a VC funded startup since 2010. They already had a business when they pivoted to Docker. As far as I know they kept the same investors and board. So it seems unlikely that they suddenly remembered that they needed to make money. More likely they planned to make Docker as ubiquitous a platform as they could, at which point there are many known avenues to monetize. Also, the CEO they brought on board, Ben Golub, had just spent a year at Red Hat after selling his previous startup to them. So he was certainly familiar with Red Hat’s business and strategy, and probably on friendly terms with their leadership (this is speculation on my part).
And in the early days Red Hat and Docker were in fact partners. Docker engineers even implemented features specifically to please Red Hat; for example devicemapper support and storage drivers, which were developed by Dockerfor Red Hat.
The problem is that the partnership was built on a misunderstanding. Docker was hoping for a distribution deal between the two businesses, with revenue share etc. and intended to keep control of their open-source project. Whereas Red Hat was hoping to make Docker their “new Linux” which involved no partnership with Docker and instead taking or at least sharing control of the project as they did with Linux. Each side was slow to realize the true intentions of the other, whether by naivete or deception I don’t know. This still surprises me because both side’s intentions were rational and entirely predictable. I think a lot of wishful thinking, and possibly some individual incompetence in leadership were involved. For example Red Hat has never actually partnered with a smaller startup and shared revenue with them in the way Docker was hoping, so I’m not sure what made them so confident it would happen. In any case, when the fog lifted, bitterness and conflict quickly followed.
In the end Red Hat shifted gears to Kubernetes as their “new Linux” which was a much better match for them. Then proceeded to rewrite history to minimize Docker’s role; which is unfortunate but understandable, I guess. I know a lot of Docker employees are personally hurt by it, to this day. It doesn’t feel good to see your work swept under the rug for reasons of competition and ego.
Alexander Larsson did the lions share of the work on device mapper, and here are 29 PRs to show it (including the very first with the devicemapper label):
In fact, Solomon's own words from https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/2609 "Integrate lvm/devicemapper implementation by @alexlarsson into a driver", so unless you're more knowledgeable about the history than Solomon, I'm going to have to discount your take on this entire thing.
Regardless, I think things are at a much better place now. It is unfortunate that there were tensions and more so that Solomon had such a tough time through it all. He's a super nice guy. But this is tech, and there will always be lots of personality conflicts. It is one of the precious few constants.
It is absolutely not correct that Larsson did the lion’s share. What he did was implement a Go wrapper for libdevmapper, which exposes a very low-level API. It is the Docker team that implemented devmapper-based container storage, as well as the whole storage plugin system which was now required to support more than one storage method. The original devmapper lib is utterly undocumented and Larsson’s wrapper did not fix that. So getting that feature to work was an all-consuming task and it is the Docker team that did the bulk of it.
I actually have a slightly different explanation of what set it off. I don’t buy the “docker is suddenly under pressure to make money” explanation. Docker was a VC funded startup since 2010. They already had a business when they pivoted to Docker. As far as I know they kept the same investors and board. So it seems unlikely that they suddenly remembered that they needed to make money. More likely they planned to make Docker as ubiquitous a platform as they could, at which point there are many known avenues to monetize. Also, the CEO they brought on board, Ben Golub, had just spent a year at Red Hat after selling his previous startup to them. So he was certainly familiar with Red Hat’s business and strategy, and probably on friendly terms with their leadership (this is speculation on my part).
And in the early days Red Hat and Docker were in fact partners. Docker engineers even implemented features specifically to please Red Hat; for example devicemapper support and storage drivers, which were developed by Docker for Red Hat.
The problem is that the partnership was built on a misunderstanding. Docker was hoping for a distribution deal between the two businesses, with revenue share etc. and intended to keep control of their open-source project. Whereas Red Hat was hoping to make Docker their “new Linux” which involved no partnership with Docker and instead taking or at least sharing control of the project as they did with Linux. Each side was slow to realize the true intentions of the other, whether by naivete or deception I don’t know. This still surprises me because both side’s intentions were rational and entirely predictable. I think a lot of wishful thinking, and possibly some individual incompetence in leadership were involved. For example Red Hat has never actually partnered with a smaller startup and shared revenue with them in the way Docker was hoping, so I’m not sure what made them so confident it would happen. In any case, when the fog lifted, bitterness and conflict quickly followed.
In the end Red Hat shifted gears to Kubernetes as their “new Linux” which was a much better match for them. Then proceeded to rewrite history to minimize Docker’s role; which is unfortunate but understandable, I guess. I know a lot of Docker employees are personally hurt by it, to this day. It doesn’t feel good to see your work swept under the rug for reasons of competition and ego.