i worked in a megacorp on a 1000 person initiative - with hundreds of developers - that had standardised on giving everyone macbooks, and many teams were using docker for mac to develop and run containerised integration tests locally. when the docker pricing model was announced, there seemed to be a pretty strong value proposition to just paying the monthly per-user license fee to continue using the software and not disrupt what teams were doing vs putting the effort into migrating to something else. what were the alternatives? develop a new linux+some other hardware soe, migrate everyone off the macbooks to that, then migrate to podman? etc. it could be done but the switch cost and effort would be a big distraction, and it'd require a lot of re-work and risk to reimplement all the enterprisey things that had been established for the macbook soe (like email, "endpoint protection", video conferencing, etc). another alternative could have been to burn a lot of engineering effort to eliminate the use of local container-based workflows, say, or for someone to build out a developer VM soe so that people could remote into linux machines to develop with podman.

it was interesting that a lot of the docker pricing model is about container image storage in docker hub, in the enterprise context i was working in, that job was already been done by running private container registries in the chosen cloud vendor's platform, so the docker hub offering didn't really add any value.