Whats phenomenal about this so far is that the email does not indicate:

    - what actually will happen to teams that don't become paid
    - what will get deleted on which timeline
    - whether others will be able to typosquat the images after the teams get deleted
    - how folks might handle cases where a team is owned by an oss org and has no central billing thing (fairly common)
    - how we might better handle bot users as part of paid teams

If anything, I'd want to convert my teams (dokku and gliderlabs) _back_ to single accounts, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that.

I get that there is a need to make the company profitable but maybe spend more than 5 minutes crafting the email and thinking of outcomes for your users (who are already pissed at your pricing changes). This only makes me feel like I should move my hosting to something paid (ECR?), delete the org, and then typosquat the images.

Utterly confusing messaging from Docker once again, and this is from a prior advocate for early Docker, and part of their Captains program for several years.

The wording seems clear that they are going to delete all data and lock access unless payment is received within 30 days, whether there are public or private repos in the organisation.

I pay for a personal account, however my main concern is people taking over the official account names and publishing poison images which people are used to pulling already, and won't even think to check if the account ownership has changed.

I've asked the CTO to comment on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1635679295891812359?s...

Everyone who has a "Free Team organization" just received the following email:

> Docker is sunsetting Free Team organizations

> Free Team organizations are a legacy subscription tier that no longer exists. This tier included many of the same features, rates, and functionality as a paid Docker Team subscription.

> After reviewing the list of accounts that are members of legacy Free Team organizations, we’ve identified yours as potentially being one of them.

> If you own a legacy Free Team organization, access to paid features — including private repositories — will be suspended on April 14, 2023 (11:59 pm UTC). Upgrade your subscription before April 14, 2023 to continue accessing your organization.

> If you don’t upgrade to a paid subscription, Docker will retain your organization data for 30 days, after which it will be subject to deletion. During that time, you will maintain access to any images in your public repositories, though rate limitations will apply. At any point during the 30-day period, you can restore access to your organization account if you upgrade to a paid subscription. Visit our FAQ for more information.

Basically giving everyone ~30 days to migrate their data (to another host or paid Docker plan) or lose access to it.

As a funny side-note, the PDF seems to have been made so you cannot copy-paste text out from it, so no interactivity. But that also means that the "How much does a Docker subscription cost?" doesn't actually have any information about how much a subscription cost, and the link to the page doesn't work. Great work Docker Inc.

Docker: We're making 100 million/year in revenue and everyone is treating us as the trusted place to work with docker images--we're a huge success!

"For our next act, let's hold their images hostage and threaten to kill them in 30 days unless they pay a ransom!"

I mean, it's ok to hate your users, but maybe just don't make it so obvious?

FYI, there is now an issue on Docker's GitHub to ask questions and comment on, per Docker's CTO

https://github.com/docker/hub-feedback/issues/2314

https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/1635704358355468307

---

key takeaways

> Any organizations suspended or deleted will not release the namespace, so squatting previous namespaces will not be possible.

It seems to be a habit at Docker to give incredibly short notice before service shutdowns: See the 2018 shutdown of some Docker Cloud services which had a two month notice period ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16665130 )

I got bit by that back then as a commercial customer and sent a complaint to them. Response was an offer for tickets and travel to a just upcoming Docker Con. Well, thanks but no thanks. I don't need to go to their conference when I'm busy migrating my org to a different service provider.

The information not included in the title is that Docker-the-Company is only shutting down DockerHub private free registry container image hosting.

Presumably the publicly accessible DockerHub projects can continue, business as usual.

Are there alternative docker registry hosts which provide free private image hosting?

Edit: I found a gist with an extensive list!

https://gist.github.com/JakubOboza/fbd6259f5b6321f17e8c3cdb1...

Docker as the default librarian of images due to the root namespace hijack in docker clients has a duty of care to maintain trust. A policy of preventing namespace reuse for 1 year before recycling should give time to prevent poisoned images squatting on popular handles.

At this point I stay far away from anything Docker Inc. Podman already has an architecture that makes way more sense on Linux. There are plenty of free alternatives for image registries, but self hosting is also super easy (I mean why not just run a registry container and be done with it).

I work for a non-profit scientific research organization and we pay for a DockerHub Team subscription. It's where we host almost all of our images. But we also had a small Free Team that was used for one project just to put it in a different namespace, which we now have to scramble to move somewhere. It doesn't make any sense to double our costs just for that one project.

This move by Docker does not inspire any confidence in their long-term management, and will very likely drive us away from DockerHub entirely. It's really sad to watch this company fall from grace. I was an early adopter and always rooted for them from the very beginning.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to preseve the paths of public images on organizations that used to be on the Free Team plan? It doesn't look like it allows you to select the Docker Personal plan (the only free one) for organizations, does that mean the image identifier of these images will need to change or can I convert an organization into a personal account somehow?

Does anyone know if any deals/exemptions exist for Open Source?

Don’t want all my images for github.com/pion/webrtc to not be available, but paying is a bit much.

For anyone who needs a replacement container registry, doesn't mind self-hosting, checkout Project Quay[1]. It is a free, open-source, container registry. Primarily developed by Red Hat. It has a complete and well documented API[2]. And, in general has great documentation[3].

[1] https://www.projectquay.io/

[2] https://docs.projectquay.io/api_quay.html

[3] https://docs.projectquay.io/use_quay.html

DigitalOcean offers a single repository for free.

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/container-registry

I think docker is potentially just another example of service that can change terms and leave you in the lurch. Imho we are entering a time where portability and the ability to control your own destiny is going to be very important. That means when you do commit to a provider, or host, make sure you can move off. Maybe use methods that mask the end user from back-end provider changes or shenanigans, etc.

Thanks Docker for accelerating the migration to podman and github's container registry.

I think most, if not all, open source software I use that recommends Docker install has shifted to GitHub packages these last year or two (frigate and mautrix as an example). I won’t be surprised if this accelerates this transition.

We just got this as well. All we're using it for is to have a namespace for public repositories, but the email doesn't say anything about whether or not those will be kept around.

Anyone can deploy and run a selfhosted registry server, I fail to see a problem here. It's even better to keep your team's private images off Docker servers.

got this email for a small open source project I had.

Not having a lot of users yet, so not sure I'll bother with the Docker Open Source Program which takes time to apply and wait for manual review. Also the email and faq doesn't mention the existence of Docker Open Source Program, which is seems a sign of no guarantee that rule won't change again.

Wondering which would be better alternative, Codeberg vs Github CR?

My biggest concern is the use of the local application. I don't _think_ that is affected but we'll see. I don't currently log in at all on the local application, will they start requiring you to login to even use the application?

We keep our repositories on AWS ECR, so we don't need it on Docker.

Is there any progress on podman for Windows or any other way of running containers on Windows? I cannot wait for the day theejder development community doesn't need to rely on anything from this company.

It's fairly common for dev tool hosts to not provide team features for free. Every time something comes up lately about Docker, it's anti-favorable, I don't get it. They freakin' let us self-host our own container registry if we want and explain it in detail: https://docs.docker.com/registry/deploying/

Instead of pay us or get deleted, why don't they create another free tier for public repos only to support OSS?

Switch to FileCoin for hosting where you can donate your laptop as a hosting ressource.

We need a distributed registry for things like this, something like Bittorrent.