You lose a lot of goodwill from the community if you refuse to change the code that a `docker pull image` no longer defaults to hub.docker.com AND then start to monetize teams, ESPECIALLY non-commercial open-source teams.

If they would mandate a registry then many more people would host their own and take the load off of their system.

But no, they want to have it all. And yea, they can. That I don't care about.

But you can't make a change, and walk back from it, and expect people to be happy, given the story that came before all of this.

Very often reversing a decision is not even comparable to having never taken it.

Currently the situation is that a lot of people will think twice before generating any dependencies with free teams, or perhaps Docker altogether.

Absolutely. The ones I hear are moving away from Docker Hub are currently not moving away from it because they have to, as Docker Inc reversed their decision. They are moving away from Docker Hub because they want to avoid getting hurt in the future, as Docker Inc proved they don't really care about them unless it becomes a PR disaster, and next time there might not be one.

Admitting it was bad and reversing it is (usually) better than just letting the original bad decision stand, but you can't erase what you've done. You still publicly decided to do something that caused people to lose trust and faith in you. People will wonder if you're going to make other bad decisions, and then not walk them back when people tell you how bad those decisions are.

There are also good and bad ways to apologize and change your mind. I don't have an opinion as to whether or not Docker's apology and reversal were done well, but I think it's fair that some could believe they weren't.

Announcing it damaged their reputation. Reversing doesn't undo that (because there's always the chance they'll do it again), but now they don't even have the benefit of not having to host so many images.

What went bad is a little thing called trust. From the community.

Probably, especially from those who think in the long term. Like those who builds things for themselves. They don't like to read news from Docker every day and keep in mind that their project images and even base images can just disappear overnight. It's too expensive for them to track docker decisions. It just takes resoures.

Making bad decisions is not bad at all. Losing trust is.

Or they were just testing the waters and check the reaction to the decision, as companies often do.