[Zandikar]

> Does this commercial company expect volunteers to give them images for free which give their paid subscriptions value?

Yes, to an extent, because it costs money to store and serve data, no matter what kind of data it is or it's associated IP rights/licensing/ownership. Regardless, this isn't requiring people to buy a subscription or otherwise charging anyone to access the data. It's not even preventing unauthenticated users from accessing the data. It's reducing the rate at which that data can be ingested without ID/Auth to reduce the operational expense of making that data freely (as in money) and publicly available. Given the explosion in traffic (demand) and the ability to make those demands thanks to automation and AI relative to the operational expense of supplying it, rate limiting access to free and public data egress is not in and of itself unreasonable. Especially if those that are responsible for that increased OpEx aren't respecting fair use (legally or conceptually) and even potentially abusing the IP rights/licensing of "images [given] for free" to the "Library built on the back of volunteers".

To what extent that's happening, how relevant it is to docker, and how effective/reasonable Docker's response to it are all perfectly reasonable discussions to have. The entitlement is referring to those that explicitly or implicitly expect or demand such a service should be provided for free.

Note: you mentioned you don't use docker. a single docker pull can easily be 100's of MB's (official psql image is ~150MB for example) or even in some cases over a GB worth of network transfer depending on the image. Additionally, there is no restriction by docker/dockerhub that prevents or discourages people from linking to source code or alternative hosts of the data. Furthermore you don't have to do a pull everytime you wish to use an image, and caching/redistributing them within your LAN/Cluster is easy. Should also be mentioned Docker Hub is more than just a publicly accessible storage endpoint for a specific kind of data, and their subscription services provide more that just hosting/serving that data.