Developers of some open source projects hosting container images on the Docker Hub directory have received notice that the Docker Free Team subscription service, previously provided free of charge to organizations that maintain open projects, is about to end. The possibility of free personal placement of images by individual developers remains. Officially supported images of open source projects will also continue to be hosted for free.
Docker estimates that the change will affect about 2% of users who are recommended to upgrade to a paid plan ($14 per year) by April 420 or fill out an application for participation in the Docker-Sponsored Open Source Program initiative, which allows you to get free access to Docker Hub for actively updated open source projects that meet the criteria of the Open Source Initiative, developed in public repositories and do not receive commercial benefits from their developments (projects that exist on donations (but without sponsors), as well as projects from non-profit foundations like Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Apache Foundation are allowed)
After April 14, access to private and public image repositories will be limited, and organization accounts will be frozen (personal accounts of individual developers will continue to be valid). In the future, for another 30 days, owners will be given the opportunity to resume access after switching to a paid plan, but then the images and accounts of organizations will be deleted, and the names will be reserved to prevent re-registration by attackers.
There was concern in the community that the deletion could break the operation of various infrastructures tied to container images downloaded from Docker Hub, since there is no understanding of which project images will be deleted (a warning about the upcoming termination of work is displayed only in the personal account of the image owner) and there is no guarantee that the image in use will not disappear. Because of this, open source projects using Docker Hub are advised to make it clear to users whether their images will be kept on Docker Hub or moved to another service such as the GitHub Container Registry.
Source: opennet.ru