You have the same control with both options. You can take the image down whenever you want. Current registry just makes it harder to find the image, harder to use the image and is way less reliable. How should a customer work with that when he doesn’t know whether the registry will be up when he wants to pull the image or not?
The current public credentials to not increase control or security in any way.
For proprietary software docker hosts the docker store (https://store.docker.com).
You also have some more control over your uploaded containers than at the docker hub.
Docker Store has the disadvantage that you’re not allowed to offer on docker store and sell apart from it. It is understandable but I don’t think that is what Seafile Ltd. wants.
It could be an option to reach more customers, though.
No matter where it is published the docker image still has many things that need to be improved and there is very few documentation.
I think that is not a real problem.
I use a lot of the Oracle middleware and database images from the docker store at work.
You have to buy the images in the store before you can use them, but thats just a click on the ‘buy’ button, the licensing is done the usual way.
With docker there is no stable tag by definition. latest is just the tag being used when none is specified but by definition it doesn’t say anything about the image provided at the tag.
And it pretty much looks like the registry is broken, again.