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 pe

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.