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How does Docker capitalize on open source while still monetizing its platform and how does it approach its open source business model?

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.

Find this answer in Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker, on growing from $11M to $135M ARR in 2 years
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