Developers of some open-source projects who host container images in the Docker Hub directory have been notified about the upcoming cessation of the "Docker Free Team" subscription service, which was previously provided for free to organizations overseeing open-source projects. The option for individual developers to host images for free will remain. Officially supported images of open-source projects will also continue to be hosted for free.
According to Docker, the change will affect approximately 2% of users, who are advised to switch to a paid plan ($420 per year) by April 14 or apply for the Docker-Sponsored Open Source Program, which allows access to Docker Hub for free for actively maintained open-source projects that meet the Open Source Initiative criteria, developed in public repositories and not generating commercial profit from their developments (projects existing on donations are allowed, provided they have no sponsors, as well as projects from non-profit foundations like Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Apache Foundation).
After April 14, access to private and public repositories of images will be restricted, and organizational accounts will be frozen (personal accounts of individual developers will remain active). Subsequently, for another 30 days, owners will have the opportunity to regain access after switching to a paid plan, but then the images and organizational accounts will be deleted, and names will be reserved to prevent re-registration by malicious actors.
There are concerns in the community that the deletion may disrupt various infrastructures that rely on container images downloaded from Docker Hub since there is no understanding of which specific project images will be removed (the advance notice of the impending cessation is only displayed in the image owner's account), and there is no guarantee that the image being used won't disappear. In this regard, open-source projects using Docker Hub are recommended to clarify to users whether their images will remain on Docker Hub or be migrated to another service, such as GitHub Container Registry.
Source: opennet.ru
