This has been the standard practice for all tech companies. Make it free to capture the market and snuff out all competition. Once they have secured the whole market then its time to start making money to pay back the millions they borrowed from VCs for decades
It’s like playing Plague Inc. (reverse version of Pandemic the board game where you play as the disease): to win, develop all possible methods of spreading first; only then develop symptoms, and do it fast before anyone has time to react
I find it surprising that people notice the part about symptoms[1], and despite this happening repeatedly we do relatively little against the part about spreading.
Part of it is perhaps by definition, “spreading” already assumes success. Still, I’d welcome some regulation; or at least awareness; e.g. a neologism for companies in that stage, growing at cost and only getting ready to develop symptoms.
Dockerhub isn't vetted either. Dockerhub is major compliance risk. Too many images of questionable maintenance status and sometimes questionable build. Aside from maybe some base images I wouldn't pull anything from there for enterprise use. (For toying/experimenting around slightly different)
One can't rely on library updates being done, thus one has to have a build chain form many images.
I feel that dockerhub no longer can be the steward for the default docker repo because of this and the limitations they previously have implemented. It is time for them to hand over the baton stick to someone else, or that the notion of a default repo is removed all together