This issue was brought up in the initial hacker news thread, when Docker was moving towards this pricing model. Here we are, $120M ARR later.
I was personally looking for an alternative even before the license change, because the performance of Docker Desktop on my Macbook Pro is terrible in a number of different ways.
Juicing ARR in a dying company is not rocket science, keep an eye on that number and compare it in 2025 or so to Apple or Microsoft.
Isn’t this forum supported financially by startups generating value from solving someone else’s problem…for money?
Also, please explain how one would "juice" ARR to $120M.
In theory it’s simple and it’s happened many times: If you have a company with a lot of users but no income stream, you can hold those users hostage without adding much value, just find something that causes immense discomfort if it disappears and charge for it. Profit skyrockets, customers leave over time, the company dies.
if they can keep providing value to their high-revenue clients, sure, they might keep doing great, but if all they provide is a mediocre desktop app and the dockerhub these companies will eventually set up a caching proxy for the dockerhub (or otherwise trim down pulls), and will migrate to alternatives for the desktop app.
the hockey stick looks great though. and comparing it with Atlassian is really apt, because Jira is a bona fide UX garbage fire, but ... there are just no real alternatives. So folks continue to pay for it. It's madness, but there's a method to it, of course.