And in those larger companies, just paying for the "coffee a month" may not be an option, since they insist all licenses are company owned and it's less effort to change my docker VM wrapper than get shit past my company's purchasing department in a reasonable amount of time.

It doesn’t help that the compulsory “Business” edition is burdened with the anti-feature of Docker Registry but that SSO is still “on the roadmap.”

There’s no way we would have gotten the product through IT Security Management on time, much less through purchasing. Docker appears to have fallen down a bit on their market research - they forgot that their real customer for the Business subscriptions weren’t the developers at large companies, but their software purchasing processes.

Exactly, I think this is really going to backfire for the bean counters that took over Docker. It should either be free or $100k+ agreements for extremely large companies. They're way underestimating the inertia and pain with trying to nickle-and-dime small and medium business users.

gotcha. i was aware, but doesn't apply to my current circumstance.

is that the motivator for most, then?

It was the motivator for me. But having gone through the effort to evaluate alternatives, I’m happy where I ended up (lima). It’s free and open source, and easier to install and configure via scripts than Docker Desktop. The goal for our team is to make getting new developers set up as simple as possible (ideally just a single command), but prior to now the instructions to install and configure Docker Desktop were always an asterisk in the prerequisites section.