What happens to Portainer CE?

CE has been the community edition for the last ten years. It will continue on the 2.x codebase. It will not receive the 3.x changes. Portainer 3.x will remain free for the community under our 3 Nodes Free program, so nobody in the community loses access; what changes is that we are not cutting a separate CE build of it. 3.x is tailored specifically for an enterprise audience (the policy model, the operations API, the single-purpose consoles all assume that shape of user), and releasing that as CE would misrepresent what it is and who it is for.

No Open Source License for version 3, this didn’t bode well for any project that has tried this before.