Can someone explain this to me since I don't really use docker so all this feels weird to me? It would appear the entity provides oft-used service. Did they overstep on price or the suddenness of the announcement or some other combination I am not seeing?
From my perspective a large part of the issue is that they were trying to charge the wrong people. What they needed to do was figure out some way to make the people using dockerhub to build things to pay. What they attempted to do was charge people making it possible for other people to build things off of dockerhub.
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 issue with it, for open source projects, was that it was not really clear what exactly would happen, and then my understanding of what would happen did not please me at all.
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.
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.
Did they promise it will be free forever?