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.
It's not the money, it's the bureaucracy. You can't just buy software, you need a justification, a review board meeting, marketplace survey with explanations of why this particular vendor was chosen over others with similar products, sign off from the management chain, yearly re-reviews for the support contract, etc...
And then you need to work with the vendor to do whatever licensing hoops they need to do to make the software work in an offline environment that will never see the Internet, something that more often than not blows the minds of smaller vendors these days. Half the time they only think in the cloud and situations like this seem like they come from Mars.
The actual cost of the product is almost nothing compared to the cost of justifying its purchase. It can be cheaper to hire a full time engineer to maintain the open source solutions just to avoid these headaches. But then of course you get pushback from someone in management that goes "we want a support contract and a paid vendor because that's best practices". You just can't win sometimes.