1) As you very well know, Docker is already working on cryptographic signature, federated DNS based namespace and simple hosting on object stores. If you "would like to see convergence", why didn't you join the effort to implement this along with the rest of the Docker community? The design discussion has been going on for a long time, the oldest trace I can find is at https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/2700 , and the first tech previews started appearing in 1.3. Yet I can't find a single trace of your participation, even to say that you disagree. If you would like to see convergence, why is that?
2) You decided to launch a competing format and implementation. That is your prerogative. But if you "would like to see convergence", why did you never inform me, or any other Docker maintainer, that you were working on this? It seems to me that, if your goal is convergence, it would be worth at least bringing it up and test the waters, ask us how we felt about joining the effort. But I learned about your project in the news, like everybody else - in spite of having spent the day with you, in person, literally the day before.
3) Specifically on the topic of your pull request (which we also received without any prior warning, conveniently on the same day as your blog post). So now we have 2 incompatible formats and implementations, which do essentially the same thing. Once we finish our work on cryptographic signature, federated dns based naming etc, they will be functionally impossible to distinguish. How will it benefit Docker users to have to memorize a new command-line option, to choose between 2 incompatible formats which do exactly the same thing? I understand that this creates a narrative which benefits your company, CoreOS. But can you point to a concrete situation where a user's life will be made better by this? I can't. I think it's 100% vendor posturing. Maybe it's bad PR for me to say this. But it's the truth. Give me a concrete user story and I will reconsider.
> but it would be worth a lot if I could run any image on any platform.
That technology exists, it is called a VM. Any platfrom that supports x86 for example will run any x86 compatible image. You can use wrappers and scripts like Vagrant on top of it.
Or if you want all hosting managed as a pool of resources (storage, CPU) try something like oVirt.
> and doesn't address any of the reasons why people prefer containers to VMs for some types of workloads
I was responding to one reason -- which is "running any image on any platform".
> why people prefer containers to VMs for some types of workloads
Sure but there are no magic unicorns underneath, knowing what you get from a technology requires some understanding on how it works. Saying things like "I want very lightweight but also want it to run any image on it" is asking for a trade-off. Or a complicated multi-host cabaility based platform.
I've got a use case. ACI support would let me use containers without being coupled to Docker's registry. I really don't want to run that software, and I really, really don't want to rely on Docker Hub. ACI's use of existing standards for their "registry" implementation is a major draw for me.
To clarify, I don't want to run my own registry and I don't want to rely on any third party for image hosting. I just want to pull tarballs from a dumb file server. No need to run a registry for that, and no one company has a privileged position in the namespace.
It's maddening, because I love Docker-the-concept but not Docker-the-implementation nor Docker-the-ecosystem. I honestly do understand how many would find the UX of "Docker, Inc. at the center of things" to be a refreshing convenience, but to me that notion is frustrating and repellent, as much so as if Git remotes defaulted to GitHub.
> I just want to pull tarballs from a dumb file server.
Is there something I'm missing that you couldn't just use wget? If you have the URIs, I can't imagine how pulling down an image by name would be more than a quarter-page Python script, even if you include the untarring and such.
Yeah, that's about what I've been doing, but AFAICT I lose the benefits of layering when I refuse to speak the registry protocol. Docker's export command dumps the entire image tree, so I'm stuck transferring GB-sized payloads to deploy the tiniest change to my app. appc manages to do layers without a coordinating registry. (Kind of funny that CoreOS bought Quay, on that note.)
Yes, you can run your own registry, but doing so without every pulling anything from DockerHub means rebuilding all images yourself and tagging all of them for your own registry and pushing to that, or DNS / firewall hacks to redirect requests for index.docker.io (or forking Docker).
There is nothing "respectful" about anyone's behavior on either side of this trainwreck, and calling each other out on a web forum isn't going to help anything.
1) As you very well know, Docker is already working on cryptographic signature, federated DNS based namespace and simple hosting on object stores. If you "would like to see convergence", why didn't you join the effort to implement this along with the rest of the Docker community? The design discussion has been going on for a long time, the oldest trace I can find is at https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/2700 , and the first tech previews started appearing in 1.3. Yet I can't find a single trace of your participation, even to say that you disagree. If you would like to see convergence, why is that?
2) You decided to launch a competing format and implementation. That is your prerogative. But if you "would like to see convergence", why did you never inform me, or any other Docker maintainer, that you were working on this? It seems to me that, if your goal is convergence, it would be worth at least bringing it up and test the waters, ask us how we felt about joining the effort. But I learned about your project in the news, like everybody else - in spite of having spent the day with you, in person, literally the day before.
3) Specifically on the topic of your pull request (which we also received without any prior warning, conveniently on the same day as your blog post). So now we have 2 incompatible formats and implementations, which do essentially the same thing. Once we finish our work on cryptographic signature, federated dns based naming etc, they will be functionally impossible to distinguish. How will it benefit Docker users to have to memorize a new command-line option, to choose between 2 incompatible formats which do exactly the same thing? I understand that this creates a narrative which benefits your company, CoreOS. But can you point to a concrete situation where a user's life will be made better by this? I can't. I think it's 100% vendor posturing. Maybe it's bad PR for me to say this. But it's the truth. Give me a concrete user story and I will reconsider.