Today is shaping up to be “developer day” at DockerCon17 in Austin, Texas. While questions of monetization and enterprise software hang in the air, for now, Docker Inc. seems as committed to its open-source developer base as ever.

“I’m pretty sure everything that was announced today is open source; it’s in there; it’s in the free version,” said Stu Miniman (@stu) (pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. Miniman and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus) (pictured, left), theCUBE co-host and Wikibon analyst, assessed several new announcements unveiled the event.

These announcements include LinuxKit, which is a container-native toolkit for building Linux distributions quickly. The Moby Project is another open-source project Docker announced today, which plays to its growing ecosystem by helping users collaborate, experiment and create container-based systems.

“For the first couple of years, Docker said, ‘Batteries are included, but swappable, which means things like Swarm [a clustering and scheduling tool for Docker containers], we’re going to bake it in there, but you can use an alternative,'” Miniman said.

Moby takes a much more modular approach for a change, he said.

Forays into lock-down products like Docker Swarm for container-management elicited some jeers from open-source diehards. By the looks of the free Docker Community Edition and these open-source announcements, there is little reason to fear that Docker will go full proprietary any time soon, Miniman stated.

The enterprise question

That said, the conference just kicked off, and tomorrow may take a radical turn away from open source.

“I suspect tomorrow we will probably hear more about EE,” Miniman said, referring to Docker Enterprise Edition.

Kobielus agreed, saying containers are becoming standard in enterprises, and the company stands to gain if it seizes on this, he explained.

“Docker is making some serious investments in beefing up their entire enterprise stack, including Swarm,” he said, adding that Swarm versus Kubernetes (an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications) will likely be a topic of hot debate at the conference.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of DockerCon US 2017 Austin.

Photo: SiliconANGLE