One of Docker's biggest problems is that internally they have fomented a culture of "users are stupid" which is immediately apparent if you interact with their developers on GitHub.
It makes me sad that you believe that. We're not perfect but we try very hard to keep our users happy.
Are there specific issues that you could point out, so that I can get a sense of what you saw that you didn't like?
Keep in mind that anyone can participate in github issues, not just Docker employees, and although we have a pretty strict code of conduct, being dismissive about another participant's use case is not grounds for moderation.
EDIT: sorry if this came across as dismissive, that wasn't the intention. We regularly get called out for comments made by non-employees, it's a common problem on the github repo.
Look dude, this is hard. Most of the people here are rooting for you, even the ones complaining. I'm on your side.
But this isn't about you, or your feels, or what you think is going on.
All that's happening is people are trying to communicate with you and you're not listening. You're doing your best, I don't doubt that, but you've got to step back, regroup, and come at the problem from another angle.
Don't get defensive, don't make excuses. "When you make a mistake, take of your pants and roll around in it." ;-) Give people the benefit of the doubt that they mostly know what they're complaining about (even if they don't.)
It's a pain-in-the-ass, but it's the only way to deal with this kind of systemic (mis-?)perception in your community.
I have said one form of this or another to Solomon regarding Docker the company and his own personal defensiveness on two or three separate occasions on this account alone[0]. So while I laud your effort, I don't think much is going to change on this front. Honestly, that's too bad and I'm not being snarky or shitty here; I genuinely wish Docker and Solomon would work on this stuff because it'd go a long way. I'm discouraged to even bring stuff up any more.
I don't even think it's intentional, really, but I have never once seen a response by Solomon to criticism of Docker that did not dismiss the content and messenger in some way. These things are hard to get right and I'm not perfect, so I don't even really know what advice to offer and I'm far from qualified. I am very frequently dismissive of criticism as well and have had to put a lot of work into actively accepting it, so I can at least understand how hard it is.
I outright told him his initial reaction to Rocket, to use an example, directly caused me to plan for a future without Docker. Companies are defined by their executives, and a lot of Docker's behaviors become clearer when you consider some of the context around Solomon's personal style.
I feel a little badly about the exchange now, having more of the context available.
I told my sister last night, jokingly, "I think I made a co-founder of Docker cry on HN today." (I also explained what Docker and Hacker News are a little. She likes me so she didn't call me a nerd to my face.)
Honestly, I was just amused at the reply evidencing (or seeming to) the very attitude the OP was complaining of, it was incredible.
It is your right to ignore nonpaying users but do so at your own peril. RedHat is a perfect example of this. They started loosing their lead in the Linux market as soon as they quit directly supporting the desktop version of RedHat Linux. Fedora was a poor replacement and it opened the door for Ubuntu. What RedHat didn't realize was that even though these nonpaying users seemed like a drain on resources, they were the next generation of hackers who would have recommended, or even insisted upon, RedHat enterprise at their future jobs and would have brought with them the expertise to roll it out.
Docker may be on top now but if you don't cater to the needs of your nonpaying users, it will be short lived. This includes taking seriously feature requests which don't necessarily serve enterprise.
Why don't you just ignore people like this? There's a whole thread about technical issues upthread, and you respond to some random guys emotional problems?
If there is a problem with the way the Docker open source project is run, it is with the amount of small but serious bugs that affect subsets of your users. This is probably due to you guys overextending.
Responding that you are saddened by this guys issue with his perception of the 'culture' in your team is just craziness. No one will be helped by this. The only thing that will help is showing that you guys are running a tight ship. Maybe hire an extra person on two to maintain your GH issue garden and proceed with making Docker the successful business we all believe it can be.
fwiw I read this comment and didn't find it dismissive at all. shykes indicated this isn't the experience the docker community is striving for and asks for specific instances so that he could gain more context and to potentially address the problem.
I have seen many instances of individuals with no affiliation to an open-source project being negative or rude and therefore giving a negative impression of the community or parent company. As a project owner or maintainer this is a really difficult thing to see happening, and can be difficult to address and prevent. So I personally think shykes makes a valid point. I wouldn't take this as dismissive. Give him the benefit of the doubt.
I also think we should cut maintainers a bit of slack. Imagine your are managing an open source project with over 10,000 logged issues and even more in the community forums. It is draining to spend all day dealing with complaints and issues and can be a thankless job. Maintainers often try to put their best foot forward, but it isn't an easy and they are human, and make mistakes and say things they regret. I'm not saying it is justified, just try to put yourself in their shoes.
I've personally logged a few issues with the Docker team and have also found the interactions to be respectful. There are times when I've asked for features and they have certainly played devils advocate, but that is to be expected with any project that is trying to prioritize their work and constantly fighting feature creep.
Sorry, that wasn't the intention. I tried to clarify with an edit in the original post.
It looks like now is not a good time for me to participate in this discussion. Instead I'll make a list of things we can improve so that the next HN post about Docker is a more positive one.
naaaaaaw! Don't squander this golden opportunity to connect with your peeps! You can turn this around, but you've got to "walk the talk" here.
You should just be like, "Hey folks, we're sorry as hell we let you down. I'm here now and I'm listening. What has made you sad, and what can we improve?"
People love that sh--stuff.
That's just my advice. I don't even use Docker. I just like to see warm-fuzzy success, eh?
I'm not the original commenter, but the "--insecure-registry should be on docker pull" issue is one that impacted me personally. It was maddening reading all the comments from frustrated users who were running into the same problems I was: https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8887
I think this is one of many instances where Github's issue system doesn't enable good communication between developers and end users.
- You shouldn't have to read through pages of posts to find potential workarounds.
- You shouldn't have to count comments to guess if there are a lot of people affected by an issue.
- You shouldn't have to read comments, then wonder which posts were an official developer response or a comment from another end user.
- There should be some way to communicate easily that "this issue has our attention, but dealing with it is de-prioritized because ..."
In this instance, you can see it's a security issue and it will be tough to convince Docker to change it, but at this point it's two years later and people are still griping about it, so maybe it's time to put some attention on it. There are a few suggestions for seemingly reasonable updates, but nobody is championing any of them, presumably because there's no indication other than comment activity that Docker will consider any updates on this issue whatsoever.
I'm not sure myself what the right thing to do from Docker's perspective would be, but this is clearly one of those issues that has worn through the attention span of the development team. Someone either needs to stand up and say "we're not changing anything here" or "we're looking for a solution" - no bug report should be open that long.
"Like @ewindisch already said, we do not want to encourage this client-side behavior. The pain induced by requiring the flag as a daemon flag, is so that people actually set up TLS on their registry. Otherwise there's no incentive. Thanks for your understanding."
Dude, you literally had the founder of Docker asking you where the opinion came from that devs don't care about users. He or she just pointed out that often times non-employees talk on github issues and just remember Docker can only be responsible for employees conduct, not that of others. You've read into this that
1) you have been called a mouth breathing moron
2) it is confirmed that docker is run by assholes
3) the founder does not care about users (by asking for examples of poor conduct by Docker employees)
4) docker is run by a lousy leader who cannot demonstrate care, again by asking where people get a sense of docker not caring.
Internet comments lack a lot of tone so its easy to misread, but when there's this kind of fanatic backlash when there's a direct connection to the founder of a pretty big service, the luster of any of these sites dims considerably. You have given nothing actionable to the person who could have done something positive for docker, and just made it that more difficult for the organization to take legitimate criticisms at face value.
Well, that's an incredibly cynical and negative way to read shykes' words. FWIW, I thought his post was fine.
A more constructive response than yours would be to post examples of where Docker has failed in community engagement, rather than just re-stating his post with the most negative spin possible.
They more or less ignored the file sync issue of Docker for Mac, until there was a push asking the Docker devs for more transparency. There were other issues with the release, and where people did not push for it, issues would languish with no one from the dev team saying anything. It sometimes feels like a culture of coverups and shame. (Let's hide this under here and maybe no one will notice).
If people are feeling the "users are stupid", combined with what looks like coverup culture, I find Docker's blog posts less and less credible.
For example, there was a recent blog post about An independent security review comparing Docker to other similar technologies, including rkt. The conclusion of the post was that Docker is secure by default. (I'll leave it to the reader's own opinion whether that is true or not; this is not the issue I am pointing out).
What is so weird is that, nearly two years after the fact, the tone in that blog post was still as if CoreOS had betrayed them. And while I get there are hurt feelings involved, this is not a high school popularity contest. When combined with arrogance and coverup culture, I can see Docker moving in a direction that drives them further and further from relevancy.
Based on what I'm hearing here about Docker Swarm, Swarm is basically a great advertising for K8S or Mesos. No one there is pretending that multi-node orchestration is an easy problem. If the divergence from the community continues, I can see lots of people fed up and going over to rkt, or something else that works just as well.
> They more or less ignored the file sync issue of Docker for Mac
Which particular problem? The crappy performance/CPU usage one(s), or something else? Having used various different approaches (docker in vmware linux/virtualbox), the d4m (osxfs?) one seemed to be the least broken for general dev stuff.
Hopefully not more issues I need to keep a lookout for.
Crappy performance related to the osxfs --latency issues for writes for host volumes. It's getting closer to the latency as Docker for Linux. (I hear though, workarounds like using unisonfs and fswatch works all right)
There is also the bit about host networking. Since Docker for Mac runs a transparent Linux, the host networking goes there instead. That thread ended up in a big, roaring silence.
I've also had such an experience. Same with Realm.io. The developers get very dismissive with just about anybody who comes in saying they have a use case which doesn't fit the scope of what already exists. Meanwhile features/fixes sit on the backlog for years.
I'm not saying this will necessarily stop me from using a project, but it definitely does not create any loyalty.
Compare this to say Rails, where I've had really positive experiences with the maintainers.
This is pretty dangerous path to failure. If you look at the most successful companies it is obvious that they respect the user base using their service. Software is no exception to that, you have to make it user friendly, regardless if your user base is mostly software and systems engineers.
I don't think it's so cut-and-dry. I mean, does Oracle respect its users and is it user-friendly? What about Epic, the dominant software system in the healthcare industry? Or Microsoft SharePoint?
"If you look at the most successful companies it is obvious that they respect the user base using their service" - I think a better way of putting it would be that "successful companies respect their customers". In the case of software tools like Docker, the customers generally are the users. In the case of Epic, an electronic health record, the buyers are senior management, the users are the clinical staff such as the nurses, doctors and techs. So Epic does give the senior management what they want (buzzword compliance, a safe choice that it's hard to get fired for), but doesn't give clinical staff what they want..because they are not the ones making the buying decision.
Won't validate whether this happens with Docker, but I've seen it other places. I won't name names, but I bought a commercial add-on to an open source project very similar to Docker, and when I had a support issue, I was pretty much told "tough luck, not my problem" by the project founder.
Was the "project founder" related to the company that sold you the commercial add-on? If not, why should he support it, unless of course there is some commercial relationship between the open source project and the company selling the add-on?
Yes, his company is the one that made the add-on; it was their first commercial product atop the open source project. Today they're a nice fat funded company, but then, they had little revenue, which really put me off.
