1. Because they've privileged Docker Hub throughout all Docker tooling everywhere, and encouraged everybody to treat it as the central community hub of images.

1. Because they've privileged Docker Hub throughout all Docker tooling everywhere, and encouraged everybody to treat it as the central community hub of images. It's not just any registry: it's the core registry for the entire ecosystem, and they've very actively worked to ensure that state (rejecting all requests to make the default configurable, or to deprecate implicit registry references, etc). 2. Because the open-source application form excludes the vast majority of open-source projects. E.g. Curl isn't eligible because the founder additionally offers paid support. I imagine Elixir won't be either as the founder profits from it by running an Elixir consultancy (https://dashbit.co/ https://dashbit.co/). Docker Inc itself is marketed as an open-source project, but clearly wouldn't be eligible either. There's no revenue limits, no flexibility, just 'no plan towards >$0 revenue ever'. This is not most people's definition of 'open source'. 3. Because although yes it is a lot of traffic, they're trying to charge the community orgs to host images, whilst simultaneously they already charging the end users to pull these images too! They tightened the rate limits in 2020 so that any serious download usage as a client already requires a paid account. 4. Because they've given only 30 days notice before they'll drop all the existing images, with no redirection or migration options at all - just "pay up or we delete everything". 5. Because this will break every existing reference to every deleted image everywhere, and there are _millions_ (because as above, they've encouraged everybody to treat Docker Hub as the core ecosystem registry), from blog posts/documentation/tutorials to CI jobs to deployment definitions, and this is going to be a massive bomb that hits the industry & huge numbers of developers (even their paying customers!) when it lands in 29 days. If you're a substantial company with 100s of devs, sure, you should be paying for Docker. If you're a 3-person community project publishing open-source images to Docker Hub that these companies are using, making a tiddly income with commercial support, you should not (and in practice, you probably can't).