wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t need Docker?
fully agree! Initially I just manually set up a rails environment on my laptop which worked fine (although this might be more difficult if you’re not used to rails). Then I tried the (awesome) ansible scripts on the server and documented the experience here Ansible deploy on debian / docker - #3 by orangeman The only reason to use docker had been the ubuntu dependencies.
make the OFN compatible with any setup people want to run
That’s what docker - how I understood it - promised to do: make OFN run anywhere by just running a ready build image inside an isolated (movable) container. I was really inspired of how simple and quick(!) it was to setup wordpress in seconds: docker-compose up -d and done. The whole “setup” is isolated and can easily be moved to another server. The ansible scripts have been rather slow and it took a lot of attempts until they finally ran through. Then I tried docker commit and thought this would save all the work… but it didn’t. After running the committed docker image on my local machine it was necessary to start nginx, postgres, unicorn, memcached services manually and I couldn’t get the background job runner to work (…) Probably I was doing docker wrong 
be careful that the OFN doesn’t become full of workarounds to live in every possible environment.
Very true! Keep it simple. I’m not excited about docker the tool. I’m excited about the promise to quickly spin up OFN instances and being able to easily stop/start an instance or move it to a different machine. Maybe docker container is not the right tool for this? @enricostn talked about plain linux containers LXC. Any thoughts about that?