Can we just get the big three cloud players to make a new public repo? They’ve got oodles of bandwidth and storage, plus the advantage that a lot of access would be local to their private networks. Setup a non-profit, dedicate resources from each of them spendable as $X dollars of credits, and this problem is solved in a way that works for the real world. Not some federated mess that will never get off the ground.
Consensus on a new repo for public community images would help, but it isn't the biggest problem (as the author notes, GHCR does that already, and GitHub seem pretty committed to free hosting for public data, and have the Microsoft money to keep doing so indefinitely if they like). The issue I worry about is the millions of blog posts, CI builds, docker-compose files, tutorials & individual user scripts who all refer…
They're taking a big chunk of open source and tossing it in the garbage.