The “hypocritical” Docker began to clear open source organizations and delete all images without paying!

Edited by Zhu Kexin | Meng Yidan

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

On March 15, Docker sent an email to all Docker Hub users who created an “organization”, reminding them that they must upgrade to the paid team plan of $420 per year, otherwise, the Docker image of their account will be deleted.

From the official FAQ, we can know that the groups affected by this adjustment are open source organization accounts, including Docker individuals, Docker Pro, Docker Team or Docker Business accounts, Docker sponsored open source members, Docker verified publishers, and Docker official images Not affected.

The body of the email is roughly as follows:

• Docker is retiring Free Team Organizations, as the free feature has many of the same features, rates, and capabilities as a paid Docker Team subscription;

• After reviewing the list of accounts of members of the legacy Free Team Organizations, we have determined that you may be one of them. If you’re using the old version of Free Team Organizations, access to all paid features (including private repositories) will be suspended on April 14, 2023 (11:59 PM UTC). Need to upgrade your subscription (by implication, pay money) before April 14, 2023 to continue accessing your organization;

• If you do not upgrade to a paid subscription, Docker will retain your organization data for 30 days, after which it will be deleted. Your access to the public repository will be preserved during this time, but will be rate limited;

• If you upgrade to a paid subscription, you can restore access to your organizational account at any time within 30 days.

As we all know, Docker Hub is used by many open source projects to release images, and most projects rely on free images. If the images are deleted, it will have a huge impact on the accounts of organizations that use free.

As soon as the news broke out, it caused a huge controversy, and many people began to migrate their images out of Docker to other platforms or self-host. Subsequently, Docker CTO said directly on Twitter: “Those accounts that do not pay will be closed and no one else will be allowed to take over the name.”

(Source: Twitter screenshot)

Docker and open source

In fact, for developers, the reason why Docker was widely used in the past can largely be attributed to: open source and convenience. Docker provides a set of standardized solutions, which greatly improves the efficiency of deployment, release, and operation and maintenance.

In 2013, Docker was launched as an open source engine, focusing on the needs of developers and system operators, separating application dependencies from infrastructure, and has become a very popular Linux container solution nowadays.

(Source: Screenshot of Docker official website)

And, the success of Docker on Linux led to a partnership with Microsoft to bring Docker containers and their capabilities to Windows Server. Earlier, the technology obtained from Docker and its open source project, Moby (an open source framework created by Docker) has been used by many data center providers and cloud providers, and many providers provide container-native IaaS products through Docker.

In June 2015, Docker donated the container image specification and runtime code (now called RunC) to OCI (Open Container Initiative) to help establish standardization and promote the development and maturity of the container ecosystem.

In 2017, Docker continued to give back to the Containerd project by donating the project to CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation).

Problems brought about by the payment model and solutions

The sudden change from “free” to “paid” has brought a lot of panic and doubts to users in the open source project community. In this regard, Docker officials also mentioned related problems and countermeasures.

(Source: Screenshot of Docker official website)

1. When the payment cost rises from 0 USD/year to 420 USD/year, how can users check whether they are affected?

You can check your own Docker organization account page, any affected organization will be marked as “Docker Free Team” in the “Subscription” column, but less than 2% of Docker users have a Free Team organization on their account.

2. Will the open source images that users rely on be deleted?

Won’t. A public image only disappears if the image maintainer decides to remove it from Docker Hub. If maintainers migrate to the Docker Sponsored Open Source Exemption (DSOS program) or paid subscription to Docker, their public images will continue to be distributed.

Here the author also mentions the DSOS plan by the way:

• The mirror project applied for must not be commercialized

• Do not provide external services

• Do not accept sponsorship,

• No paid plugins may be published

• Any other profit-making measures that essentially fall into these types of situations shall not be taken in the future

• Only donations are allowed to keep the project running.

3. If the user is running an open source project, how to deal with this situation?

Currently, Docker encourages all open source projects to apply for the DSOS program, and has assigned more people to review.

4. How to maintain access to private repositories?

Private repositories for organizations is a paid subscription to Docker feature and will be suspended after April 13, 2023 if you are currently accessing a legacy Free Team organization and using private repositories.

However, you can choose from several subscription tiers to continue using your private repository.

5. Will the Docker image under the user name be “occupied” by others?

Docker makes it clear that even if a user account is deleted or voluntarily leaves Docker, other users cannot “occupy”.

6. Can I migrate to a personal account?

It is possible to migrate from a Free Team organization to an individual user account by filing a support ticket. During ticket processing, Docker will not take any action on the account.

7. If I migrate to an image platform other than Docker, can I export the data?

Yes, but only before April 13, 2023.

8. How much does a Docker subscription cost? What advantages exist?

(Source: Screenshot of Docker official website)

From the official website information, Docker provides three paid subscription tiers. Docker clearly stated the respective advantages of the three:

• Docker Pro is for individual developers who can increase their productivity;

• Docker Team is suitable for small teams who want to collaborate efficiently;

• Docker Business is suitable for businesses looking for centralized management and advanced security features.

Also, after upgrading Docker to a paid subscription, the user account and all related configurations, images, repositories, settings, etc. will remain the same.

For a long time, open source has brought unexpected high-value output to many users invisibly through an open cooperation method. Therefore, even though the official “solution measures” and the advantages of the payment model are clearly stated in Docker’s charge changes like drinking poison to quench thirst, it still seems to be unable to appease the hearts of the people.

Die-hard supporters send long posts accusing Docker of hypocrisy

As a hardcore supporter of Docker, Alex Ellis, a loyal member of “Docker Captains”, posted a long complaint on his blog. As a paying user, he does not object to Docker making money, but Docker’s communication methods and effects are terrible, which has created anxiety for many of the most loyal and supportive community users. Hypocritical about open source sustainability issues, this one program is rife with hostility and disjointed operations.

For the many projects he maintains on Docker, he has already published them on GitHub’s Container Reigstry. Due to the rate limit of Docker, he also had to spend money to quickly download images such as Prometheus, NATS, Go, Python, and Node.js.

He said that the only hope at present is that organizations with “open source” certification can be exempted from the “taxation” of Docker, such as projects owned by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) or the Apache Foundation. And listed the well-known open source project curl, which is used on almost every Mac and Linux computer, even Docker itself is also using it, but it cannot escape the charging plan.

If the developer is able to completely delete your organization, it can be recreated as a free personal account. This should be enough to preserve the name from malicious takeovers. But this is too low a possibility, because large projects cannot simply delete their organization and all mirrors.

If this is the case, and you can tolerate some downtime, you can try the following:

• Create a new personal user account

• Copy all required images and tagged images to the new user account

• delete organization

• Rename individual user accounts to organization names

In addition to Alex Ellis’s long complaint, there were heated discussions among netizens on Hacker News and Twitter.

• One SRE manager bluntly said: “When I saw this news in the morning, I felt very headache.” Then also mentioned: “In the next 30 days, a bunch of images I rely on may disappear…”

• One netizen said directly: “Very worried.” Even admitted: “I recommend creating your own private Docker registry, downloading all current versions of the images you use, and pushing them to said registry. Maybe, use Google to back up important images in case something goes wrong with Docker Hub.”

• Some netizens also joked: “Docker is still someone else’s wedding dress in the end, I mean the wedding dress of the Containerized standard”, “free service that requires money to maintain” and “low risk” are incompatible.

However, some netizens are more “optimistic” about Docker’s approach, thinking: “Docker is a tool that has advantages for software development. It is much better than the old way of managing dependencies and can ensure that everyone in the project The installed version remains the same.”

In the past, with the development of technologies such as cloud native, containerization, microservices, and K8s, Docker has been widely used in the developer field. Today, Docker will delete all images of unpaid open source organizations, which will inevitably bring “discomfort” to developers. Although they can also apply for free, the terms are very harsh. What do you think of this move by Docker?

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN