CEO of VulnFree here, a hardened image company.
Our view is that this was largely a marketing maneuver by Docker aimed at disrupting Chainguard’s momentum.
The deeper issue in the container security space is a lack of genuine innovation. Most offerings are incremental (and offer inferior) variations on what Chainguard has already proven.
When Chainguard’s funding round last February drew significant industry attention, it triggered a rush into “secure images” as a category. We know because VCs have been reaching out to us incessantly. That, in turn, pushed Bitnami to attempt monetization of what had historically been free images, and Docker to offer free images to fill the vacuum Bitnami left following their attempt to monetize.
We were monitoring Docker closely and suspect that following their "Docker Hardened Images" splash they realized it was a lot harder to sell into the industry than they initially realized.
The reason source code is rarely shared in this space is straightforward: once it's open-sourced, a meaningful barrier to entry to the hardened image industry largely disappears.
Truthfully, at current prices you're 100% paying for quality of life. From all public pricing figures I've seen, it's cheaper to build hardened images, in-house than to buy from a vendor.
Our offering at VulnFree is technically priced below the cost to build in-house, but our real value add is meeting dev teams where they are per our custom hardened images.
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