Because nobody asked for it, this is my opinion on the use of the MAINTAINER directive in your Dockerfiles.

The documentation says simply:

The MAINTAINER instruction allows you to set the Author field of the generated images.

Many people end up putting the name and email address of an actual person here. I think this is ultimately a bad idea, and does a disservice both to members of a project that produce Docker images and to people consuming those images.

  1. Your image probably has (or will have) more than one “maintainer”

    Any non-trivial project is going to have more than one person contributing to things. If you are the original creator of a Dockerfile, but later on someone else starts making some changes, which of you is the “maintainer”?

    Furthermore, asserting individual ownership over something that is better off being maintained collectively tends to discourage people from making changes (oh, this belongs to Bob, I’d better not touch it…).

  2. Individual contributors may feel overwhelmed

    The individual responsible for creating a Docker image may or may be great at communicating with consumers. If all questions about an image are going into a well-intentioned by ultimately unresponsive black hole, nobody is going to be happy.

  3. Individual contributors come and go

    Most open source projects have fluid membership. Someone who is around now and actively maintaining things may not be around several months down the road. Having an absentee member listed as the “maintainer” of your images means that email about those images will probably not reach anybody in a position to respond.

  4. Your project probably has a bug tracker

    Most projects have some sort of bug tracking mechanism available. These are generally in place both to keep track of the bug reports and support requests coming in as well as acting as a mechanism to distribute the work involved in responding to them to all members of a project.

    Ideally, you want questions about any images you maintain to go through the same tracking mechanism.

For all of these reasons, the MAINTAINER field of your Dockerfiles should point to either a web site URL or to a common project email address that goes into a bug tracker or is at least distributed to more than one person.