Container business Docker scrambled on Thursday to bandage a self-inflicted marketing blunder, the unfair suspension of its Docker Free Teams account.
“We apologize,” Docker chief marketing officer Tim Anglade declared in a statement. measuring kalpa“We’ve done a terrible job of announcing the end of Docker Free Teams.”
Did a terrible job of announcing the end of Docker Free Teams
The day before, Docker sent an email informing legacy Free Teams organizations that they have a 30-day grace period. Paid upgrade subscription. The recipient (mainly an open source project administrator) lost access to paid features, including his private repositories, and was told that his organization’s data would be deleted if he failed to pay.
Docker currently offers four main tiers of services. Individual (free). Professional ($60/year); Team (minimum $300/year); and Business (minimum $1440/year). written down for dead In 2017, Docker shifted many customers. From free account to paid account And now it seems to be thriving.a year ago business trumpet An additional loan of $105 million brought the valuation to $2.1 billion.
As part of making business viable, the container platform chose to discontinue Free Teams, which is believed to be used by less than 2% of its customers because account plans no longer make sense.
“The Docker Free Team subscription was discontinued partly because it wasn’t targeted,” Anglade explains. “In particular, the recently updated Docker-Sponsored Open Source (DSOS) program, the latter offering benefits beyond the deprecated free team plan. ”
The problem was that Docker’s message left many with the impression that deletion of org data extended to the org’s public Docker image. This scenario would have wreaked havoc in the open source community. A Docker image specifies the software components used to build a container and provides key functionality in a software deployment pipeline. When I remove them from Docker Hub, break all kinds of the application and building infrastructure.
Anglade addressed that misunderstanding in his mea culpa. “I would also like to clarify that public his images will only be removed from Docker Hub if the maintainer decides to do so,” he said. “We regret that we were unable to clarify this in our initial communication.”
Affected developers also expressed concern about what would happen to their organizational namespaces if their Free Teams accounts were not migrated to an alternative DSOS program. A malicious person could hijack the name of an abandoned account and use it to host malicious images under a trusted name.
Also, I would like to clarify that public images are removed from Docker Hub only if the maintainer decides to do so.
However, Anglade’s statement, in an accompanying set of FAQs, explains that namespace squatting is not an issue because Docker does not release namespaces for organizations that have left Docker, stopped, or been deleted. doing.
The damage is nevertheless dealt. Some developers plan to: Transition Put the Docker image somewhere else. Some say they tried to join the DSOS program, was not accepted Or they didn’t hear back – Docker says it’s trying to address it by having more staff to review applications.
Still, individual developers operating as free Teams organizations found the minimum $300 annual Teams fee too high for developers not participating in the DSOS program.
too late
Software developer James Sandford GitHub issues for Docker Hub responded to container companies’ efforts to solve the problem by claiming that unclear communication isn’t really a problem.
“Communication of this change has been poor, but I hope you understand that this is not the community’s primary concern,” he wrote. We haven’t addressed the majority of community concerns.”
“Teams will continue to be deactivated. Images will continue to not be updated. Images that use affected images as a base will also be affected and may be less visible. Some teams are currently It is a financial burden.
“Anyone using Docker Hub should work hard now. [into] Analyze and mitigate the impact of this on your code/workflow. Some people have to communicate their plans to stay or move to Docker Hub. And the community has to give him 30 days notice to avoid all this. ®
