Annoying but not the end of the world IMHO. In any case, I have a dockerhub account so I can publish containers there; so I might as well use it. Similarly I have a Github account and am actually a paying customer as well. The bottom line is I have accounts left right and center for things that I depend on professionally. Some of these I even pay for but most of them I don't pay a penny.

This is a closed source product distributed for free. They are well in their rights to charge money for it even. Given that and given how important this product is for my day to day routine (I run lots of docker stuff all the time), and given that docker has been contributing a lot of OSS code in this space, I think this is a relatively small and entirely fair price to pay.

I don't agree with the sense of entitlement in this thread. Docker providing a free community edition of a product they've built that allows running docker on top of Mac/Windows is not charity but a means for them to up-sell their commercial solutions. That's the only reason it exists. I'm grateful that it exists and I hope that they can make this work so I can continue to depend on this.

An alternative is getting a linux laptop and running pure open source versions of whatever containerization you require.