https://www.docker.com/blog/we-apologize-we-did-a-terrible-job-announcing-the-end-of-docker-free-teams/

We apologize for how we communicated and executed sunsetting Docker “Free Team” subscriptions, which alarmed the open source community.

For those of you catching up, we recently emailed accounts that are members of Free Team organizations, to let them know that they will lose features unless they move to one of our supported free or paid offerings. This impacted less than 2% of our users. Note that this change does not affect Docker Personal, Docker Pro, Docker Team, or Docker Business accounts, Docker-Sponsored Open Source members, Docker Verified Publishers, or Docker Official Images.

The Docker Free Team subscription was deprecated in part because it was poorly targeted. In particular, it didn’t serve the open source audience as well as our recently updated Docker-Sponsored Open Source program, the latter offering benefits that exceed those of the deprecated Free Team plan.

We’d also like to clarify that public images will only be removed from Docker Hub if their maintainer decides to delete them. We’re sorry that our initial communications failed to make this clear.

We apologize again for the poor communication and execution surrounding this deprecation and promise to continue to listen to community feedback.