A company builds an open source project as the core of their product. They do the work of building container images and pushing them to Docker Hub so the community can pull and run them easily. Then one day they announce they are stopping. Four days notice. Or less.
That is what happened recently. The community pushed back. Hard.
I get why companies do this. Building and hosting images costs money and time. Resources are not unlimited. At some point a company may need to stop providing that convenience. The problem is not the decision itself. The problem is how it gets done.
Do Better on the Company Side Link to heading
No community likes a bait and switch. People get used to the workflow you gave them. They write docs, automation, and internal processes around it. When you yank that away with almost no warning, they feel it.
If you have to stop providing builds:
- Tell people earlier.
- Give them a real transition window, not a few days.
- Explain the why in plain language.
- Point them at alternatives.
Resources are a real constraint for companies and for communities. Cutting back is sometimes necessary. But communication and a bit of runway go a long way. Ease people off instead of dropping the floor out from under them.
On the Community Side Link to heading
Here is the other half of this.
When have we ever been afraid of building something?
Most of us in open source started the same way. We pulled down the source and built a kernel. Or a package. Or a container. We were not scared of it then. We should not be scared of it now.
Yes, pre-built images on Docker Hub are convenient. That convenience is nice until it is not. When a company stops providing it, the answer is not panic. The answer is to build it ourselves again.
There are tools for this. GitHub Actions will build and push images. The openSUSE Build Service (build.opensuse.org) has been doing this kind of work for a long time. Plenty of other CI systems will do the same. You already know how to do this work. You have done it before.
Treat it as a badge of honor. You are not dependent on someone else’s build pipeline. You can produce what you need from the source that is already public.
Both Sides Have Work to Do Link to heading
Companies need to stop treating community members like they will just absorb sudden changes. Communities need to stop treating convenience features as permanent entitlements. Both sides understand that resources matter. Both sides can do better at the handoff.