The company Docker Inc. continues on its course and cancels free offers: Now the “Docker Free Team” model has to believe in it. This made it possible to publish public container images for free under a team’s name in Docker Hub. Open source projects, among others, have used the offer.
On March 14, owners of such teams received an email saying that the “Docker Free Team” offer was being retired. If you want to keep the functions, you are asked to switch to a pay-subscription model. This applies to at least five users, costs at least $300 a year and is called “Team”.
If you don’t switch, on April 14 at 23:59 UTC, access to all functions that are only included in paid packages, including private repositories, will be restricted. However, the mail left many questions unanswered, Docker Inc. answers some in an FAQ. However, the FAQ does not have answers to a central question: The document does not reveal whether public images created as part of a free teams package will also be deleted after April 14.
Need for action for open source
Open source projects should apply for the “Docker-Sponsored Open Source Program” (DSOS) – even if they have already been rejected in the past. If Docker Inc. joins the program, they get the benefits of the Teams package for free. The company promises to process the applications quickly and claims to have hired new employees for this purpose. A submitted application for DSOS should have a suspensive character.
However, the DSOS does not help small companies that run an open source project on the side. You would be forced to book a Teams account. The DSOS terms clearly state that the project must not embark on a path towards commercialization. A formulation that brought Docker Inc. plenty of criticism from the open source community, after all, Docker also started as an open source project that gradually became more commercial. Developers’ frustration is now venting itself in a GitHub issue. Discussion participants criticize, for example, the non-transparent and hasty communication and the 30-day deadline.
Anyone who decides to leave the Docker Hub with their organization does not have to fear that their own organization name will be released again. The FAQ clearly states that names are not reassigned – that would also be a serious problem from a security perspective, because strangers could hijack a project and deliver malicious code.
Docker Inc. uses a different solution: You can’t convert an organization to an individual account – that would be a simple shortcut for open source projects to continue publishing in Docker Hub, after all, public images of individual accounts are still free.
With this step, the importance of the Docker Hub as a point of contact for container images is likely to dwindle in the long term. The technical structure of the registry corresponds to the standard of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) anyway, and other registries also work in conjunction with Docker, Podman and Kubernetes. Developers can find alternatives at GitHub, GitLab, Google or Quay.io.
(jam)
To home page
