- Valuation Model
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- Founders, funding
How does Docker capitalize on open source while still monetizing its platform and how does it approach its open source business model?
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Scott Johnston
CEO at Docker
History is always interesting. The Unix market became balkanized almost from day one. There was Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX—but nothing interoperated. There are many different Linux distributions out there. The Red Hat app doesn't run on a SUSE server or on a Canonical or Ubuntu server.
We're very fortunate that this has not yet happened to the container market. You can run a container on Docker Desktop, you can run it on Red Hat OpenShift, AWS-ECS, or AWS-EKS. You can run it on Azure ACI completely unchanged, and that's really important.
What’s also important is that it then allows this massive market to form, and for us, a fantastic business to be built off monetizing just a slice of that.
A big, growing, holistic market is an opportunity for us. The fact that this market is standardized and that there's many ways in from a developer's standpoint to give value to that developer is how we see the opportunity. That is a long way to answer it.