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.
And usually the need is coming from someone below C-level. So you have to: convince your manager and his manager convince procurement team it has to be in a budget (and usually it's much easier to convince to pay for the dinner) than you have a procurement team than you need to go through vendor review process (or at least chase execution)
This is reality in all big companies that this rule applies to. It's at least a quarter project.
Once I tried to buy a $5k/yr software license. The Sidekiq founder told me (after two months of back and forth) that he's done and I have to pay by CC (which I didn't had as miserable team lead).