Podman rocks for me!
I find docker hard to use and full of pitfalls and podman isn't any worse. On the plus side, any company I work for doesn't have to worry about licences. Win win!
Was this a deal breaker for any company?
I ask because the Docker Desktop paid license requirement is quite reasonable. If you have less than 250 employees and make less than $10 million in annual revenue it's free.
If you have a dev team of 10 people and are extremely profitable to where you need licenses you'd end up paying $9 a year per developer for the license. So $90 / year for everyone, but if you have US developers your all-in payroll is probably going to be over $200,000 per developer or roughly $2 million dollars. In that context $90 is practically nothing. A single lunch for the dev team could cost almost double that.
To me that is a bargain, you're getting an officially supported tool that "just works" on all operating systems.
You can run your own VM via any number of tools, or you can use WSL now on Windows, etc etc. But Docker Desktop was one of the first push-button ways to say "I have a Mac and I want to run Docker containers and I don't want to have to moonlight as a VM gardener to do it.
On Windows, you can use the docker that's built in to the default WSL2 image (ubuntu), and Docker Desktop will use it if available, otherwise it uses its own backend (probably also Hyper-V based).
I use Orbstack myself, but that's also a paid product.