I'm equally shocked nobody has bought them out to keep them well funded and not focused on trying to monetize (outside of just billing for private images). Every cloud provider like CloudFlare (I think?), Azure, AWS, GCP, etc benefit from Docker, it seems like a no brainer to me... You would then condense the org to just developers and PMs. Then marketing and other employees could be shifted to another part of the parent org and condense it down to a core group that builds and makes the tooling stronger.

I wish we had tax exceptions for companies maintaining open-source projects full time to be reasonable write offs or something, with strict checks so companies dont just make random "open source" projects to write off, it should be something with known sizable impact and/or use, it would make some critical open source projects attractive "buy outs" or options to fully fund for some of these giants that benefit from them. Imagine if the devs entire salary (up to a point) could be written off completely. Some of these people are working on key infrastructure for the modern web, and even other critical systems, think of Chromium (tricky because of Chrome being not-open source but a proprietary end-product), Firefox, Linux, openssl, and obviously Docker, as good example.

I think they are now doing better than ever. And they have been bought out already by Mirantis, unless I missed something.

Podman isn't really a competitor at this point, it's just the "docker at home" NIH project from redhat. It works fine, but docker isn't going anywhere really.