We’re no longer sunsetting the free team plan
docker.com
docker.com
Docker didn't do any of this. They literally tried to take a free product and just start charging for it. It feels the same as a restaurant who gave free toothpicks away suddenly want to start charging for them. This speaks to how out of touch their senior leadership is, and the only possible thing they can do to recover is to part ways with the leaders who made that terrible business decision.
I've been in meetings like this before -- some analyst runs a SQL query and makes the case for charging for something that has always been free, and hamstrung leadership goes along with it because it sounds like such an easy way to "unlock value". What they really mean, is, easy way to make money off unsuspecting people via something that should probably be illegal, and would be in a different context (i.e. bait and switch).
Docker Hub has little to offer to most commercial businesses. When we looked at it, it was hilariously slow and had basically no advantage over any other commercial registry. There was no reason to give our company dollars to Docker instead of Amazon or Google.
Docker Hub is pretty important to open-source projects, as there are very few providers who are ready to distribute large binary files for free without ads or even possibility of them. It was also pretty important to tech companies who use said projects but lack the resources to set up private registry and build docker images they need.
It's the former users who bring money to Docker, and it were latter users who were complaining. There is definitely some overlap but unfortunately (for Docker the company) it is not that big.
In that world charging is never going to yield success. The free-only users are going to find some alternative and in forcing them to do so you have sacrificed the goodwill from the free service in the first place, and the people who could pay won't do so in this case because you literally aren't offering them anything worth paying for.
> It was also pretty important to tech companies who use said projects
Should I add anything? If you can't make your point without such glaring contradictions, I don't know if the point is worth making.
The guidelines of the site specifically say to respond to the strongest argument, I'd recommend doing that instead of what you're doing.
> Docker Hub has little to offer to most commercial businesses.
> It was also pretty important to tech companies who use said projects but lack the resources to set up private registry and build docker images they need.
So, docker has, at the same time, "little to offer to commercial businesses", but it it's "pretty important for tech companies who use [OSS] projects" but lack resources to not rely on docker hub. I still see the contradiction.
Spare me the reference to the site guidelines. You piggybacked off my comment and made an unrelated point (docker hub is too slow for your business - how is that relevant to my initial comment?). Kettle, pot, all that.
That's not what was said, you missed out the word "most", which changes the meaning of the quote:
> Docker Hub has little to offer to most commercial businesses
It can simultaneously be true that:
* Docker Hub has little to offer most businesses
* Docker Hub is valuable to businesses that don't have the resources to set up a private registry.
These can both be true if only a minority of businesses fall into the second category.
I don't think that's exactly true (we'd need to weight businesses by revenue or number of employees for it to maybe be true), but their comment isn't self contradictory.
> You piggybacked off my comment and made an unrelated point (docker hub is too slow for your business - how is that relevant to my initial comment?). Kettle, pot, all that.
I'm not the person you were originally replying to.
“Yeah, and such small portions too!”
Remove Docker vendor lock-in and what you are left with is: Docker Hub offers the value of being able to serve static files over HTTPS.
Forced to pay or leave, the OSS folks will all leave.
When a service is free I don't think you can say it's a bait and switch when the one offering can no longer afford giving so much away.
Even for paid services, there is no guarantee prices won't rise once a contract expires, or at the next billing cycle. Now if they had promised free forever then perhaps a case could be made for false advertising.
If you have deeper pockets than your competitor you could bleed them dry by offering it for free until they're dead and then "coincidentally" not being able to afford keeping it free after that.
I distrust free services as a consumer at this point, but I think it's unrealistic to expect enough people to do that to keep it from being a way of distorting the market and stifling competition.
If it's less of a dirty trick and more of a "shit, we thought we'd figure something out, but we didn't" then I still think there being more scrutiny/regulation around free services could be beneficial purely to push companies away from stupid self-defeating and market-harming business models?
It’s such an odd position. Like, the age old razors / razor blades model should be illegal? Video game consoles / video games?
Subsidizing an initial purchase by charging for ongoing services is so core to our economy that I’m not sure what it would look like to prohibit it.
I imagine a lawyer could convince a jury of people who have never heard of hacker news, gnu, etc that this is true.
try explaining all this to someone uninterested or uninformed about technology. A cubicle worker or something.
All the effort that surrounds it may be considered a service (often paid, sometimes subsidized). But that's distinct.
People understand very well the product vs service distinction. They notice every time they check their credit card statement.
The precedent things like this would create could easily be extended to other things. Good lawyers could hold things the OP isn't think about to this standard. Especially if theres a jury uninformed about the topic at hand.
Anti-dumping laws for well capitalized companies engaging in anti-competitive behavior
sales tax based on the cost of services
Perhaps if you offer a free service, you should be legally required to either post a notice "this service may switch to a paid version at any moment with a 30 days warning", or make a public promise "this service will be provided for free until 2030" (or any other year). You are allowed to increase the year later.
In the former case, you could be sued if the notice is deliberately hidden. In the latter case, not providing the free service would be considered a breach of contract.
To be fair, it is fairly often an anti-competitive behavior. And we are not better off for it.
A stark contrast to SalesForce's response to the bait and switch on Heroku customers..
[1] https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-ima...
What other alternatives exist? I can do a registry with object storage backend, but I still have to host the registry container/VM itself, and I have no scanning, no ha, no permissions. I could use GitHub for everything maybe but who knows if they don’t jack up their prices? I’m also not confident about putting all my eggs in that basket. I could use quay, but that ain’t cheaper…
Though I suppose some startups are genuinely naive enough to just launch and hope they'll find a revenue stream rich enough later.
I'm not saying they're right or wrong, but they believe so. You need to count this when writing down your monetization plan. People nowadays are generally extremely entitled.
It increased revenue and decreased costs from the tiny percentage that actually left. I think it’s win/win for any business that doesn’t rely on network effects.
At the very least you should grandfather in old users and only change it for new users going forward.
What did I do? Found a different job and employer. Jobs are like insurance rates: you should shop around occasionally. For businesses it's a cost of doing business when trying to compete to lure new workers.
2018-2021: Look at this awesome free way of running Docker on your Mac and Windows! We're so awesome!
2021-: Oh, that? That's $800000/mo now. Pay up!
At my company, we all had to uninstall Docker Desktop while they sorted out licensing and billing or whatever.
While that was happening, everyone just switched to using Docker in WSL, almost overnight. For me the setup involved changing some settings in my IDE so that it used WSL, it was one drop-down in IntelliJ. I also used VS Code and that was even easier.
The whole thing was very puzzling for me and thousands of other engineers. Many business decisions Docker makes are puzzling. But it seems to be working out for them.
I'd say this pressure to monetize more of their services shows it's not working all that well.
The pressure to monetize further is just the usual endless growth stuff, it doesn't mean their previous monetization efforts actually went badly.
Do you have any links to analytics of that sort, would be interesting to read for me, thanks in advance!
On the other hand, it’s both irrational and incredibly entitled to expect that anything anyone ever gives you for free will be available for free in unlimited quantities, in perpetuity.
Already deleted accounts of my projects and switched to GHCR/Quay.io with a custom domain redirect [1] to avoid this happening again.
GitHub is really living up to its reputation of being the open source hub.
1. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/docker-image-registry-facade/
As for how long their tech lasts, I used XNA for a game jam in 2012, and had an alright experience. I could no longer download and use XNA by the time the 2013 game jam came around.
From experience: Word's still dropping support for older documents, and LibreOffice still supports them. (The only LO incompatibility I know is missing Math formulae sometimes, and that might have been fixed; if not, it's a fairly straightforward code change, since OOXML Math tags contain textboxes.)
At least that's what I understood. And it really sucked. I would even understand if they did not want to pay for open source images. But 1) give me more than 30 days 2) either remove my images or leave me in control to remove them later, not something in between.
Over a shorter time scale that would be called "bait and switch" and it would be illegal.
Over a longer time scale it's still a massive dick move and destroys customer trust.
No, it wouldn't. It would be "bait and switch" if you had committed to use Docker Hub for the next year, and they announced after two months that now you have to pay for it and you can't back out. If I offer you a piece of gum for free today, and tomorrow you come back and I say either pay $1 or you don't get my gum, have I committed any kind of fraud or whatever?
> Over a longer time scale it's still a massive dick move and destroys customer trust.
"Customers" on a free plan?
They also own TS, which seems to have major breaking changes each year and necessitate annual churn and refactoring of entire codebases. Windows having remarkable backwards compatibility does not mean the rest of their products do, too.
EDIT: I could also bring up one of their other products, Lean, whose 4.x versions have so much breakage that mathlib has been on a community-maintained fork of Lean 3 for as long as I can remember.
I figured it out from context but we really shouldn't have to. Type a few more characters, people...
We aren't all part of the same micro-community.
The bottom line is, one shouldn’t rely on a single corp for something that seems like “critical infrastructure”.
Having said that, Microsoft does sometimes break backwards compatibility.
I sell a Windows app (a battery meter) that cannot work on Windows 11 because the new Taskbar doesn’t expose an interface for plugins to render data on the taskbar (IDeskBand is the old interface).
So I can display a small window to the user but it’s far less convenient that showing it persistently in the taskbar.
Not a fanboy by any measure but killing projects and products left, right, and centre isn't something they usually do.
"Where can I install/buy Visual Basic 6?" https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/azure/en-US/49c35ab...
> While the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported, Microsoft's goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications continue to run on supported Windows versions. The resources available from this page should help you as you maintain existing applications, and as you migrate your functionality to .NET.[0]
This is much better support than other companies provide for discontinued platforms. Do you personally want to be on the hook for a version of your software you wrote/released 25 years ago? Especially if you've released what you consider to be improved upgrades of the software? Would you even be willing to help users upgrade from your 25 year old software? If the answer to any of those is no, then you're providing a very skewed perspective on what reasonable support for a product looks like. And once again, Microsoft is still writing articles 20 years after the initial release to help users upgrade. For all the bad crap Microsoft does, completely abandoning widely used frameworks is not one of them.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...
I repeat. Their backward compatibility isn't amazing. It may be good but let's stop pretending Microsoft deserves special kudos for what's actually a mixed bag in terms of backward compatibility. And look at the sibling comment to mine about bad backward compatibility with data, in the case of Microsoft Word.
Edit: not a sibling comment. Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35296368
[0] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/#software-a... > "Download complete list of software" lists VB6 as available.
but there's gonna be security issues.
still it shows that Microsoft's legendary (albeit narrow) backward compatibility doesn't really mean a whole lot, except for sounding cool
> you’ve probably got a 20-year-old license for the IDE already
As for this, no, someone could pick up an old app written by someone else, or lost their copy of the license, or maybe the license belonged to a company they no longer work for. Also it apparently doesn't apply to the person asking the question...
...as the answer to the question says.
> less legal ways
Because of Microsoft. Microsoft is being unhelpful here as usual
> Because of Microsoft. Microsoft is being unhelpful here as usual
Windows 11 can be bought in many places, including microsoft.com. All you need is a spare $140 or so. People pirate it anyway. Is Microsoft being unhelpful by expecting payment for software?
The reason why Github is free for normal users it that Microsoft extracts value out of the code you host there, by at least training their LLM. Same will apply for your docker containers.
This is part of the Embracing open source.
Now they have already started selling Copilot and with CopilotX bringing new AI assisted stuff to code reviews and pull requests even more people will migrate over.
This is part of the Extending.
Then after they have everyone they can get to use Github and they have extracted all value from your code they will move to the last step and ask you to pay for hosting your stuff and while git is free to use and you can setup your own servers the general UX will be so much better that even hobbyist will pay.
This is the Extinguishing
GitHub has always been free for normal users, even before MS bought them out. It is a pretty classic loss leader to get developers so comfortable with it in their personal work that they push their employers to pay for organization accounts.
Neither your extend nor extinguish meet the classic definition of either. They aren't changing the spec of git. Having a nice UX doesn't count as extinguish. Literally anyone can set up gitea or another git server. They might not get the cool toys like copilot, but that isn't git.
This is not EEE, this is watering down EEE to look not nearly as terrible as it actually was back in the day. If anything, it looks like a shill for MS trying to get people to forget what EEE actually was.
I would be fine with that. What I hated it that they gave me 30 days, and not doing anything seemed to result in my images staying on their registry, but out of my control. So that my images would rot there but still be available, and I would have to tell my users that I moved to another registry which is not Docker? What the hell was that?
This was true when Copilot only used the CODEX model, which was only trained on Github code.
But now that, they are using/going to use GPT-4, which you bet includes all code sources possible, GitLab, Codeberg, probably even your private gitea service!, it really doesn't matter anymore, they are going to train on your public code no matter what.
The only thing left to stop it is the U.S. Supreme court lawsuit, it will probably decide the Fate of modern generative A.I.
Don't let Microsoft ever get away with saying they respect privacy...
Don't let any of the Microsoft-sized Big Tech companies ever get away with saying they respect privacy, I would say
How would you EEE Microsoft?
> [..] with a custom domain redirect [1] to avoid this happening again.
I'm sure that Docker Hub is expensive to run, and the core Docker app isn't free to maintain either.
This TOS change was a fiasco, and absolutely didn't succeed in doing anything other than losing a lot of community goodwill. But I do understand why they're trying to squeeze some money out of Docker Hub. I'd be surprised if it's even break-even for them right now, and VC funds aren't exactly known for their acts of charity.
Docker Swarm was a pure technology that didn't have such shitty half thought-out dependencies.
Also: the default location of Docker images would become Google's registry -> drive more businesses to pay for Google's container registry. (It fulfills more business use cases than Docker's, so it should be easier to sell than Docker Hub.)
But IBM has pretty deep pockets - the kind where they could feasibly write off the bandwidth of a container image registry as a goodwill gesture and not bat an eye. Same with GitHub/Microsoft.
From recently history, the same cannot be said about Docker the company.
I maintain one of the projects which moved to ghcr.io and have no interest in moving back, only further away. They have shown their hand and can no longer be trusted as good stewards or ecosystem participants imo
Whole point of removing the free plan wasn't to squeeze money out from you, but to make you pay for the free storage and bandwidth. If you don't take up that free storage and bandwidth that is literally the same as removing your free plan.
I don't know how podman does container storing, but if everyone moves over you probably shouldn't expect them to have free tier forever.
EDIT: I would love to hear your counter arguments since you are downvoting. Why am I wrong?
When projects and people move away from DockerHub, it hurts Docker-the-company because it further decreases their already tenuous and evaporating relevance.
Reducing a fraction of storage and bandwidth costs isn't important compared to retaining mindshare and the perception of relevance.
Edit: @nextlevelwizard The explanation you requested has been provided. Now it seems you're disagreeing with a common, widely accepted phenomenon. I was hoping for a more collaborative interaction.
It's easy to forget the value of being an important part of a community that makes decisions on millions of $$$ in software spending, but be sure that there are plenty of companies who would love to take your place.
Reverting this incredibly dumb decision is the right course of action but there is a long way ahead to restore trust.
Even so, my takeaway is folks shouldn't bet on any one service being free forever.
Also free plans can definitely last, best example being Github. If Github would cut off free open source repos it would be over, and I'm pretty sure they are very aware of that.
My point is, it's a mistake to assume people will pay for something that was free and it's a misunderstanding to think there is no symbiotic relationship. Hosting a giant community can be incredibly valuable, especially when it's tech people with big budgets in your sector.
It's imo a business mistake to monetize in a way that goes against that. The community will have no issue finding a new home that does appreciate them (e.g. Github).
First, lock creation of new free accounts. Then announce that:
- After a long time (at least a year), newer images won't be accepted on free plan and after even longer time, existing images would be deleted.
- After a long time (at least a year), free plan images would be deleted, starting with least used first.
- Downloads from free accounts are heavily throttled. Speed becomes even slower the more stuff that IP downloads. The full speed is restored if either account owner or downloader have paid accounts
- In a few months, accounts get a quota, and you only get 10 downloads/hour for free. Everyone else gets an error message and have to try again in an hour.
... see? So many way to wind it down without having everyone freak out. Docker has really flubbed that decision.
Regardless of how long they've done it, nothing can be free forever. People who build their own companies or products based on the assumption things can be free forever set themselves up for disappointment. And it's not the fault of the providers.
https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-handbrake/blob/master/.gith...
Multi-platform builds are trickier, but essentially the same.
crane cp docker.io/openfaas/gateway:0.10.0 ghcr.io/openfaas/gateway:0.10.0
If you've not used it yet - do take a look. Crane doesn't pull the images into a local Docker library for re-tagging and re-pushing.
https://github.com/google/go-containerregistry/blob/main/cmd...
VC capital wants its money back I guess.
Having some personal infra is not a big deal. It's actually getting easier, if not legshooting with overcomplexity.
Their work is super useful and interesting. I've added them to my list of sponsorships: https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis
Thank you John - for the support.
Tremon - I get it - Hacker News users are super sceptical and fastidious.
Here's a link to the "call to arms" as John calls it: https://blog.alexellis.io/docker-is-deleting-open-source-ima...
Alex
No other big player willing or interested to buy it either.
Still working to figure out how to route both search and pull to use our mirror.
That it's hard to mirror feels like it's even more important to mirror.
A rug pull never happens at a good time and makes it's occurrence more expensive than a planned event.
Did they promise it will be free forever?
This meant that a lot of projects providing free services to docker were going to walk. For example why would the curl project upload curl images if it was going to cost them money? The people benefiting from those uploads were the people downloading the images, dockers customers (some already paying), not the curl project. (Curl is famous enough that docker wasn't going to charge them, but there are lots of less famous similar projects that they were trying to charge).
Moreover these were frequently open source projects, which are very cost adverse by nature, and who you want to be seen as supporting not exploiting.
What docker really needs to figure out is a way to charge companies downloading images, not people uploading them. Given how their service works, I have no clue how they manage that.
My understanding was that I had 30 days to migrate my projects away (or pay, but for many open source projects there is no money). If I did nothing, I would lose access to my images on their registry, but the image would stay (and rot) there, which is even worse than the image being removed.
No, unless having a free tier means forever.
Docker announced they would end the free "teams" tier and that people would need to migrate to a paid plan to retain their teams. The communication was rocky and non-specific as to the details of the impact and only gave a 30-day notice.
They quickly (next day or two?) followed up to give more specifics as to what that means (and doesn't mean).
Now a couple of days after that they are pulling back on it completely due to backlash. Probably they could have gotten away with extending the time-frame... I'm not sure why anyone would think 30 days would be ok, but I suppose it is the free tier.
Now is the time for everyone to find an alternate means to share their docker images.
I think a lot of companies would not really be capable to setup an alternative in time and would just have to start paying instead. Which would not be a bad thing. The opportunity cost of switching might be higher than just paying Docker for their services.
I do think this is a smart business move. You don't want to trade being "the place" for Docker for being "one, slightly more profitable place among many."
MBA CEO: We beat earnings estimates this quarter by more than 100 golden eggs, via our sale of the goose that lays golden eggs.
I don't believe the revenue from these avenues would save or kill the company anyway, so better make a lemonade of these lemons, right?
They describe that they have come to the light and now realize the policy was bad, as well as the communication around it, but don't describe how they are actually going to address this fundamental misalignment with their userbase and out-of touch decision making.
"What does take responsibility mean?" "This is just PR fluff". "They are just saving face." Criticism of good things because the poster didn't like the motivation. Stuff like that.
Did you really think the company was going to bare their soul to you like you were their psychiatrist or their priest? Do you think you are even entitled to that?
Commenting about whether or not this is a good decision is valuable. Complaining about the content of PR fluff is not.
Analogous to “someone who will never be happy no matter what was said”, the tone of the press release will always be happy no matter what they have to say.
It seems very natural - almost inevitable, even - that someone will reply to an artificially max-positive document with an artificially max-negative comment.
(Personally, I made peace with the tiresome nature of both press releases and critical replies by viewing it as an informal application of Laplace’s Rule - add one success and one failure to the total count to more accurately estimate the real underlying probability. The press release presents one observation guaranteed to be as positive as possible, and the inevitable critical reply presents another observation guaranteed to be as negative as possible, so with those two in hand you can look at other observations and get a better final estimation.)
So grow your own filter. But as another reply said, this press release still has valuable information remaining after having been filtered. Complaints about their press release reading like a press release do not.
I did! I combine the fluff of the PR with the edge of the negative reply and they cancel out, leaving me free to analyze the info that remains.
The reflexive complaints about press releases don't have that value.
Sure, they changed course on this single decision, but they haven't addressed the situation that allowed this to even take place, nor does it look like they are planning on it.
Even if the writer of the post explains lessons learned and policy changes they're making, it's no guarantee. The people who learned the lessons can leave the company. Policies can be changed at a moment's notice or simply never be enforced.
The best anyone will get is a contract that can be legally enforced, and that won't ever happen for free users.
If the reflexive maximally-negative complaints are contradicting the actual information presented, they had better come with strong evidence or I’m dismissing them (and I do find those comments more tiresome than press releases or the other negative replies; they come across as conspiratorial crank-cases with an axe to grind, even bordering on spam to my mind).
The comments I had in mind are “the most negative interpretation of the information that comports with the facts”, much like the non-information components of the press release are the most positive interpretation of the information that comports with the facts.
A press release contains info and fluff. The opposite of soft fluff is hard edges, so perhaps a cute and pithy summary of my view is that no fluffy PR statement is complete without an edgy reply.
I personally think the rote complaints about press releases are much more tiresome than the press releases themselves.
From all the corporations that control so much of our lives, the government, science, medicine, religion. Every major institution in our society. Every message has to be carefully parsed and squinted at, one always has to deduce what might have been the (truthful, real, honest) conversation behind closed doors that produced what we're hearing or reading.
From every message it is possible to know only one thing: what the author wants us to think. What is real is almost always another story.
That is tiresome.
Related clip from Crazy People https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzyNPoI17rE
But we all know that, right? We don't need to pretend like we don't, or act like we are offended by it, as if it's the first press release we've ever seen.
Okay, then clearly the solution is to punish dishonesty even more harshly, thus fixing the incentives.
this is why lying exists, because the ones doing the lying thinks it benefits them over telling the truth.
PR is lies, spindoctors are liars and scammers
Why should we cheer on PR and product folks trying to break their fucking arms patting themselves on the back for walking back an incredibly disruptive, short sighted and user-hostile decision?
The CEO could take a 100% paycut, relinquish all of his shares, take 20 lashes on the back, and fire himself yet the top comments will always be about "oh so this is taking responsibility huh, how about not screwing it up in the first place???"
It's a tired act.
Interesting theory, but it doesn't match my experience - the only time I've ever seen a thread about a (japanese) CEO doing those things the comments were closer to "why can't our (USA) business leaders behave like this".
(I don’t disagree with your point at all but …) I’m reasonably sure many of us get paid to do both, sometimes simultaneously to satisfy various undue optimisms, and other times encapsulating our pessimisms from certain audiences.
The tiresome aspect is also putting his own words into the CEO's mouth, to make his point. Even though parent poster is probably somewhat right and we are feeling similarly, the cynicism shines through.
And you are right, nothing that they would realistically have said would have satisfied me. But that is because they have set themselves up for failure long before. Quoting from GordonS above [1]:
> I get what you are saying, but I gave little sympathy for their situation - they used the VC tactic of "give it away to gain and monopolise the market, then do the old switcheroo once we're #1", so they had to know what was coming.
What were the multiple points of failure that led to this decision and how are they altering their operations from preventing something like this from happening again?
Without deep transparency they will lose trust.
As soon as one company gets away with leveraging namespaces to extort money the flood gates will open and everyone is going to have their hand out asking you to pay just to maintain a consistent identity across platforms.
It's time to make sure you've got trademarks on your namespaces IMO (if possible). At least that gives the upside of being able to make legal demands to companies that don't do enough to prevent impersonation and namespace squatting.
A win would be a commitment to never do this again (ideally), or put in something that binds them to provide <x> amount of notice.
What we can hope for is they learned something from this so when a hard decision like this must be made they’ll use a different approach.
But it isn’t and they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. I will be continuing with my original plan of communicating ideally not using DockerHub internally and making every effort remove our reliance off of it.
Seriously, what else do you want? This kind of pointless whinging is just noise. They flat out said they were wrong in the first place.
1) transparency into who was responsible for this decision
2) how exactly this decision was made and how they came to the conclusion that it was sound policy
3) how they are going to prevent these decisions that are disruptive, user-hostile and short sighted in the future
4) some degree of commitment they won’t sunset this in the future when people aren’t as upset
I self-host 100% of my dev environment and tools. I don't care too much about getting services from Docker Hub, regardless of whether it's free or paid. However, I do care about my namespaces and I don't want someone acting as if they're me, even if it's innocent and unintentional.
Because of that I feel like I'm forced to deal with services like Docker Hub. It's a net negative for me to begin with, because I have to take the time to register an account, but it gets really awful if everyone starts asking for money to simply own a namespace.
On the Docker Hub side, there can't be much cost in letting me hold my namespace and, because I've got my preferred namespace there, it makes it low friction to check them out as the first option if I ever need reliable image hosting that scales. There's some reciprocal benefit IMO.
In principal I should probably be paying them something because all of my self-hosted stuff runs on Docker.