Ironically, one of the results of this is that paying customers may not have access to as many open source base images.
For example, I maintain a Docker image that builds statically-linked Rust binaries for Linux. It includes static versions of several C dependencies. It's useful mostly because setting up cross-compilation is really tricky and the details change occasionally.
I've been keeping it up to date for many years, and it has about 750k downloads (which is pretty decent for a compile-time-only Rust image). I don't mind maintaining it as a volunteer service for people who use it. But there's a good chance that I'll simply retire it, and that any paying Docker customers will need to figure out how to cross-compile weird C libraries on their own.
I'm not complaining. Docker owes me nothing, and I can just build images for my own use.
I assume their free tier is (also) aimed at the open source community; thus providing images for open source software just got a bit harder and possibly costly.
If everyone and everything went paid-only, you'd see a lot less open source software get made. I may be ready to sink a bunch of time into that sorely-missing piece of software I know how to write, but I wouldn't be willing to throw a bunch of money in as well, and I'm sure lots of others would draw a line there.
Same thing with open-sourcing things created at work; it's a hard sell already, but with an ongoing financial commitment, not going to happen. So personally I'm very happy that lots companies still support this sort of thing with free services, and I really hope this kind of crypto cancer won't kill all of them eventually.
For example, I maintain a Docker image that builds statically-linked Rust binaries for Linux. It includes static versions of several C dependencies. It's useful mostly because setting up cross-compilation is really tricky and the details change occasionally.
I've been keeping it up to date for many years, and it has about 750k downloads (which is pretty decent for a compile-time-only Rust image). I don't mind maintaining it as a volunteer service for people who use it. But there's a good chance that I'll simply retire it, and that any paying Docker customers will need to figure out how to cross-compile weird C libraries on their own.
I'm not complaining. Docker owes me nothing, and I can just build images for my own use.