Seems like companies are relearning what they should have in the 2001 dotcom bust.
Keep free stuff free and add paid stuff. If your free stuff isn't sustainable, you really should have though that through early on.
This limit seems reasonable, because storage costs are expensive. But it should have been implemented day one so people have reasonable expectations on retention. Other's have mentioned open source projects and artifacts for scientific publication being two niche use cases where people still might want this data years later, but it'd be rare for it to be pulled every six months.
I only have a few things on docker hub, but I'll probably move them to a self-hosted repo pretty soon. At least if it's self hosted, I know it will stay up until I die and my credit cards stop working.
I think in Docker's case, in their original plan this free unlimited hosting was probably sustainable in a freemium model where businesses paid for Docker Enterprise and Docker.com was about marketing and user acquisition, similar to open source on GitHub.com being marketing and user acquisition for paid accounts/Github Enterprise.
Its not an unreasonable strategy to provide generous free hosting if you derive some other business benefit from it (YouTube being another example).
But Docker Inc. found their moat was not that deep and other projects from the big cloud providers killed the market they saw for Docker Enterprise and they sold it off.
So now they just have docker.com and Docker CE - which even that has alternatives now with other runtimes existing. So they need to make docker.com a profitable business on its own or find something else to do which changes the equation significantly.
Keep free stuff free and add paid stuff. If your free stuff isn't sustainable, you really should have though that through early on.
This limit seems reasonable, because storage costs are expensive. But it should have been implemented day one so people have reasonable expectations on retention. Other's have mentioned open source projects and artifacts for scientific publication being two niche use cases where people still might want this data years later, but it'd be rare for it to be pulled every six months.
I only have a few things on docker hub, but I'll probably move them to a self-hosted repo pretty soon. At least if it's self hosted, I know it will stay up until I die and my credit cards stop working.