[HN Gopher] MinIO stops distributing free Docker images
___________________________________________________________________
MinIO stops distributing free Docker images
Author : LexSiga
Score : 635 points
Date : 2025-10-22 06:17 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Looking at the change to the README last week[1], it looks like
| MinIO went from "MinIO has no planned or scheduled releases for
| this repository" and " While a new release may be cut at any
| time, there is no timeline for when a subsequent release may
| occur." to "The MinIO community edition is now distributed as
| source code only".
|
| Based on promises alone, I think that means they un-dropped the
| open source project but still only distribute the binaries to
| their customers.
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/minio/minio/commit/9e49d5e7a648f00e26f224...
| weinzierl wrote:
| Not a full replacement but there is Garage, which was quite well
| received in other HN threads.
|
| https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage
| c0balt wrote:
| Can vouch for it as an adequate self-hostable option. It has
| some missing features, compared to Minio, and is less
| compatible but works for most applications.
| olivermuty wrote:
| could you elaborate on this? we're looking at moving off
| cloudflare r2 in the somewhat near future and garage is on
| our short-list
| c0balt wrote:
| Garage worked for most of my use-cases but it lacks, among
| other endpoints[0], bucket ACLs and bucket replication.
| Anonymous access is also an open issue[1].
|
| They are also a comparatively young project and while fully
| OSS do not, afaik, appear to have a solid long term funding
| source yet. Though that might be an opportunity to support
| them, if your company is interested in picking them.
|
| [0]:
| https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/reference-
| manua...
|
| [1]: https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/issues/263
| zenmac wrote:
| We are also looking into Garage, does it support 206
| partial content seeking on the files in the bucket via
| it's http interface?
| Eikon wrote:
| Doesn't support if-match.
| znpy wrote:
| Afaik Ceph has its own object-storage functionality as well,
| which seems to be S3-compatible:
| https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/radosgw/#object-gateway
| maxloh wrote:
| Yeah. They also created a open source test suite for S3
| clones. This is a set of unofficial Amazon
| AWS S3 compatibility tests, that can be useful to people
| implementing software that exposes an S3-like API. The tests
| use the Boto2 and Boto3 libraries.
|
| https://github.com/ceph/s3-tests
| a10c wrote:
| I believe you're forced to have your data backed by a Ceph
| OSD. Whereas Minio can point to an NFS share on a NAS.
| znpy wrote:
| > I believe you're forced to have your data backed by a
| Ceph OSD.
|
| It makes perfect sense as this is a feature of Ceph.
|
| > Whereas Minio can point to an NFS share on a NAS.
|
| Eh, different trade-offs.
| dpedu wrote:
| Minio used to be able to do this, but they dropped this
| feature - "gateway mode" - several years ago.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I find garage to require quite a lot of fiddling.
| crabique wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| Aeolun wrote:
| There were setup commands I needed to run before the docker
| image did anything. I'm used to just specifying an
| access/secret key and having it work.
| nik736 wrote:
| Is there a fork already?
| stanac wrote:
| Do we need a fork? As an example, ffmpeg is source only for mac
| and windows, which just means someone else is building and
| distributing binaries.
| nik736 wrote:
| They changed their license to AGPL, removed features (Web UI,
| etc.) and now they don't provide docker images/binaries. It's
| their project but; what's next?
| rustc wrote:
| > what's next?
|
| Removing existing Docker images? Seems unlikely.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Obviously they will eventually no longer license AGPL at
| all. It's wild to me how this can be a surprise to anyone,
| this entire company has been one gigantic red flag for
| years and that's just what's publicly known. It's a legal
| department with a software product as a side business.
| debugnik wrote:
| What for? The code hasn't changed, it's AGPL-3.0. They just
| don't release their own binaries or docker images anymore.
| Tepix wrote:
| There is perhaps a need for a fork because of their recent
| removal of features (unrelated to today's post):
| https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/21584
| redserk wrote:
| Demanding people do free work for you, like starting a fork on
| your expedited schedule is quite juvenile.
|
| Forks take time and effort from humans to maintain.
| jbstack wrote:
| Where did you see a demand? The comment you're replying to
| merely asked if there is a fork.
| redserk wrote:
| The inclusion of the word "already" suggests that someone
| should have put forth effort to fork this project by now.
|
| That's where I interpreted this as a demand.
| mcpeepants wrote:
| I took it at face value - "has someone already put for
| the effort?". You know, assume positive intent and all
| that.
| gjvc wrote:
| not sure that word means what you think it means
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| MinIO was already before tricky because their interpretation of
| the AGPL is way to broad.
| stanac wrote:
| Do you have a link? I want to read more about that. Did they
| interpret any use as deriving from minio?
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| They changed their public guidance at this point, but you can
| still find references to their approach to AGPL quoted here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35328316
|
| > "When MinIO is linked to a larger software stack in any
| form, including statically, dynamically, pipes, or
| containerized and invoked remotely, the AGPL v3 applies to
| your use. What triggers the AGPL v3 obligations is the
| exchanging data between the larger stack and MinIO."
| dns_snek wrote:
| Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230327211209/ht
| tps://min.io/co...
| Tepix wrote:
| Yes, the page at https://www.min.io/opensource no longer
| contains this phrase. It sounds reasonable now. I guess
| they talked to a lawyer.
| fukka42 wrote:
| Did they ever get permissions from their contributors to
| switch to AGPL? Last I checked they did not. They didn't
| require a CLA either.
|
| So no matter what they claim large parts of the codebase
| are still apache2.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| It wouldn't matter anyways, you cannot relicense historic
| releases.
| fukka42 wrote:
| It does matter, since the current AGPL license status is
| questionable at best, they did not have permission to
| relicense code added by contributors. This is why CLAs
| exist.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| If you don't have a CLA you just end up with the new
| changes being AGPL which creates a mixed license
| amalgamation which in practical terms regresses down to
| the stricter of the licenses which would be the AGPL.
| pastage wrote:
| I like the GPL it has given us a lot.
|
| I am guessing here but I do understand why they want people to
| open source the management code of minio and in some cases how
| it is integrated into a product. I understand that AGPL might
| not be written for these requirements but I think it is time
| for a new such license.
|
| If it is part of a SaaS product that is sold I can definitely
| understand why this is important.
| MuteXR wrote:
| Keep in mind this is the same project that removed all useful
| functionality from the included web UI in the community edition
| with the excuse that it was too much effort to maintain.
|
| This is another case of VC-funded companies pulling up the ladder
| behind themselves.
| jinkylist wrote:
| Is it an excuse? Maintaining code costs money, and the previous
| versions are provided under the license, and you're free to
| modify it, pull selective patches and maintain them yourself.
| While It'd be convenient if the license was a promise to
| develop and maintain features for free in perpetuity, it just
| isn't.
|
| I run into this in non-company backed open source projects all
| the time too. Some maintainer gets burned out or non-interested
| and all they're rewarded is people with pitchforks because they
| thought there were some sort of obligations to provide free
| updates and suppport
| ukd1 wrote:
| It's different as a) they did offer it for free and b) have
| to maintain it for the closed version.
|
| However, this is also a classic move, so shouldn't be
| unexpected behavior these days...
| aforwardslash wrote:
| It is sort of an excuse. I don't use MinIO precisely because
| of this kind of behaviour - if I cannot easily develop,
| configure and test our applications, I'm not adopting it
| commercially, specially when there are a _ton_ of options to
| choose from. In the end, this hurts the MinIO 's enterprise
| offering. Having a robust, easy to deploy community edition,
| with predictable features, is a great way of allowing
| integrators to develop and test using your product, and to
| help the product to gain traction.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Conversely, if instead of making your users happy to pay you,
| you've made them happy to use your stuff for free, you own
| the consequences when you stop giving that stuff away.
|
| Welcome to HN BTW, I see you were inspired to sign up and
| defend the project owner.
| mogwire wrote:
| These are the same people who get mad at Red Hat because they
| think the 5K people who develop, maintain, and test all of
| the software do it for free
| timeon wrote:
| I understand the frustration; however using anything VC-funded,
| you are not paying for, is pretty risky.
| lysace wrote:
| It would be useful to have some kind of future feasibility
| risk analysis service for open third party dependencies.
|
| Something that can be plugged into CI.
|
| Perhaps something like this already exists?
| rustc wrote:
| It's still risky if you pay unless you have a contract
| guaranteeing what the renewal price would be.
| johnfn wrote:
| What ladder are they pulling up? Feel free to fork the last
| valid commit and make a competitor.
| abujazar wrote:
| Time to switch to Garage for dev environments and reconsider
| minio for prod. This is not how to do open source.
| c0balt wrote:
| I'm glad to have migrated to garage in time. This is quite
| unfortunate though as a lot of open source projects, like
| plane.so, used minio via container images for s3 with docker
| compose.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| thoughts on https://github.com/coollabsio/minio ?
|
| I feel like this could be used till the time plane.so or other
| projects feel like they could migrate to garage or maybe just
| use these coollabsio minio docker image?
| c0balt wrote:
| My problem was mostly that MinIO was not significantly better
| for my use-case then garage after the admin console was
| yanked. Thank you for the pointer though, I will take a look
| at this for my plane.so instance (using a private
| containerized minio there still).
| mlrtime wrote:
| What did you lose exactly, I don't get it.
| c0balt wrote:
| Minions has taken away the admin UI for everything except a
| bucket browser in one of the last releases.
|
| And now they have stopped publishing updates to their
| community edition docker images. As the linked GitHub issue
| points out this now means at least one vulnerability will be
| unpatched (unless you install from source or switch the
| image) for anyone relying on updates to the original
| container image.
|
| My loss exactly was that minio lost most of its appeal when
| it stopped having an integrated management console. It also
| seemed they were moving into a direction where features were
| gonna be more separated off for their aistore products over
| the community edition (a fair move but not something I want
| to happen to my deployment).
| Tepix wrote:
| It's an Open Source project - I don't understand what people are
| complaining about. Noone is entitled to receive free Docker
| images. I'm sure if there is enough demand, someone else who is
| trustworthy will step up and automate building them.
|
| What I'd like to complain about instead is the pricing page on
| the Min.io webpage - it doesn't list any pricing. Looking at
| https://cloudian.com/blog/minios-ui-removal-leaves-organizat...
| it seems the prices are not cheap at all (minimum of $96,000 per
| year). Note that Cloudian is a competitor offering a closed-
| source product.
| Timshel wrote:
| Well removing any distribution after a CVE is a nice touch ...
| weli wrote:
| When you always published and built Docker images for the
| public you are creating an expectation, people will rely on
| that and will chose your software based on that expectation.
|
| You suddenly deciding that you won't be offering updated Docker
| images _especially_ after a CVE and with no prior notice
| (except a hidden commit 4 days ago that updated the README) is
| approaching malicious-level actions.
|
| If they truly cared about their community and still wanted to
| go through the decision of not offering public docker builds
| the responsible thing to do is offer a warning period, start
| adding notices in the repo (gh and docker) and create an easy
| migration path, even endorse or help some community members who
| would be fine with taking care of the public builds of the
| image.
|
| But no, they introduced the change, made no public statement
| about it, waited for someone to notice this, offered no
| explanation and went silent. After a huge CVE. Irresponsible.
| blueflow wrote:
| > you are creating an expectation
|
| thats entitlement but seen from the other side.
| phatfish wrote:
| This only inconveniences open source freeloaders. Maybe you
| can volunteer some time to build Docker images?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Fork and build your own. Isn't that the whole open source
| ethos? Why it was invented and how it is intended to
| operate.
| bitfilped wrote:
| Indeed, it feels like most people today treat open source
| as a placeholder for "work I don't have to do myself" and
| then get confused/upset when the project and their own
| interests no longer align and requires effort to bridge
| that gap in alignment.
| jraph wrote:
| Rant about the concept of open source freeloaders: there's
| no such thing as open source freeloaders. If the license
| explicitly gives you the right to use the stuff for free,
| there's nothing wrong in using this right. While it would
| be the right thing to give money / otherwise support the
| projects you rely on, it's on the software developers who
| decide to give these rights (I also think it's the right
| thing to do though) to figure out the business model.
|
| There's also nothing wrong in being upset about something
| you relied on disappearing overnight. If someone decides to
| provide something for free, they should give time for
| people to stop relying on this free stuff if they can.
|
| However, I also believe you should own it if you decide to
| ever rely on prebuilt Docker images. More specifically, if
| you are relying on prebuilt Docker images, you are letting
| someone else decide on a part of your infra. And yes, this
| someone else can decide to stop providing this part of your
| infra overnight. This is on you.
|
| I also don't find anything wrong in deciding to not provide
| binaries for your open source project, or to stop providing
| binaries, including docker images.
| supermatt wrote:
| freeloader (OED): a person who takes advantage of others'
| generosity without giving anything in return.
|
| Sounds exactly like freeloading to me. You may think of
| that term negatively, but it is exactly what it is.
| jraph wrote:
| We also find the Wiktionary definition [1]:
|
| > One who does not contribute or pay appropriately; one
| who gets a free ride, etc. without paying a fair share.
|
| Which I believe is a bit more generic (giving back might
| not be the only way of being fair).
|
| > You may think of that term negatively
|
| But the term carries a negative judgement, what's the
| point of this term otherwise? Without the judgemental
| part, you'd just say "using for free" or something.
|
| The whole question is: is it fair to use open source
| software for free?
|
| And I believe it is. Actually, this is stronger than
| this: I believe people should feel free to use free
| software for free, and should not be looked down for
| doing so. This is key for freedom 0 to be an actual
| thing. (I'm not set in stone in this position and would
| be happy change my mind on this though).
|
| The notion of "giving back" can be discussed. I believe
| it is fair to get stuff from Person A for free and then
| helping B for free (later or earlier), in the hope that
| some person P will eventually help / have helped Person A
| for free for instance - this has the potential to provide
| everyone with a strong, helpful society and it would be
| even more enjoyable and reliable than a society that
| enforces pair to pair transactions.
|
| Indeed, if someone always takes stuff for free and never
| contributes to anything, I would find this unfair (unless
| for some reason they can't contribute back, because of a
| disability or something). I would call this freeloading.
| Society cannot work like this. But you need the bigger
| picture to assess this.
|
| When you start to try thinking about all this, the
| concepts of giving back, fairness, etc, it gets quite
| complicated. You also need to take in account the way
| society and the economical system works as a whole. What
| are the incentives, the motives, etc?
|
| Basically, qualifying someone as a "open source
| freeloader" without context just because they use freedom
| 0 without paying is quite bold and might not be fair.
|
| What if a company uses MinIO for free but provides some
| nice open source software?
|
| Just don't judge someone too fast.
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freeloader
| fukka42 wrote:
| What a weird take. Open source projects exist to be used.
| If you didn't want people to use it, it wouldn't be open
| source. As such the users are doing exactly what the
| creator wants: using their product. This helps the
| creator in many different ways.
|
| Of course many creators are selfish. Once they have
| benefitted from everyone using their project they think:
| we want more. Then the rugpulls start. They think they no
| longer need their users, so now they can abuse them for
| additional profit.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| https://github.com/coollabsio/minio
|
| Coolify is already doing it but your comment is on the
| verge of being passive agressive. I wouldn't say these are
| open source freeloaders because they could be using things
| like watchtowers etc. which automatically update and it
| could be a very huge deal for automated updates especially
| after I saw that some recent CVE of minio happened.
|
| Simply put this just hurts the security of people running
| minio, I wouldn't say its freeloading, its actively harming
| the community. There are people in that thread who are paid
| customers as well saying that they lost a customer. I
| wouldn't say its freeloading. Minio already has some custom
| license or paid offering and I think that they make decent
| enough money out of it, providing docker files and then
| stopping to is kinda a shitty behaviour if they are unable
| to explain the reasons exactly why. I couldn't find the
| exact reasons on why they are doing what they are doing
| except making it hard for people to self host.
| crote wrote:
| It also inconveniences people who _aren 't_ freeloaders -
| or are you forgetting about the community?
|
| People submitting PRs aren't freeloaders: they are
| _building_ the product _for_ you. People filing bug reports
| aren 't freeloaders: they are helping you solve the bugs in
| your code. People writing blog posts about setting up MinIO
| aren't freeloaders: they are writing documentation for you.
| People holding talks about it at conferences aren't
| freeloaders: they are essentially doing free marketing for
| you. Even someone leaving a "thumbs up" on a Github issue
| isn't a freeloader anymore!
|
| MinIO is _also_ screwing over those _active contributors_ ,
| who are volunteering their time to improve the value of
| MinIO's product. That's not just "no longer helping
| freeloaders", that is "actively hurting the community".
|
| Besides, I'm sure the community has plenty of people who
| would be more than happy to volunteer time to build Docker
| images. Do you really think MinIO is going to let them
| publish it under the official "minio/minio" name so the
| community can still benefit from it without MinIO having to
| "support freeloaders", or do you think there could be an
| ulterior motive behind nuking the image - such as pushing
| people to the paid version?
| eptcyka wrote:
| Nobody signed any service level agreements, the docker images
| were provided on good will. If this is business critical for
| you, consider paying someone to solve this problem for you.
| Maybe even consider paying for a F/OSS solution so you are
| not the only one funding what should be a community effort.
|
| I do concede that they could've done a better job
| communicating these changes. But they don't have to.
| jraph wrote:
| To me, there are two aspects:
|
| - if you rely on something, you should make sure you can
| reasonably rely on it (indeed, for instance by paying
| someone)
|
| - if you provide something, even for free, you should
| expect people will rely on it and you shouldn't pull the
| plug overnight if you can help it (of course, if you run
| out of business or something bad happens to you, that's
| something else). There is some kind of implicit commitment.
| Nobody should be entitled to receive free pre-built Docker
| images, but OTOH what's the point of even providing pre-
| built Docker images if you expect people not to rely on
| them? This feels pointless and you probably shouldn't start
| providing them in the first place if you have this
| expectation.
| cies wrote:
| > if you provide something, even for free, you should
| expect people will rely on it and you shouldn't pull the
| plug overnight if you can help it
|
| Do you know their reasons for discontinuing? Are you even
| entitled to know that? It's their private matter.
|
| > of course, if you run out of business or something bad
| happens to you, that's something else
|
| Huh? So now everyone should let you know "it was out of
| their hands"? You have no idea how entitled you behave.
|
| > There is some kind of implicit commitment.
|
| No. That's just between your ears. It's putting fancy
| words on a feeling you have, not something that actually
| exists.
|
| > what's the point of even providing pre-built Docker
| images if you expect people not to rely on them?
|
| How do you know they had that expectation? And why do you
| care?
|
| > This feels pointless and you probably shouldn't start
| providing them in the first place if you have this
| expectation.
|
| You are excusing yourself for these commenters that
| behave like spoiled children: not thankful for what they
| got for free, but only bitching when it stops.
| jraph wrote:
| Hey, tone down, please. Also, have you, for some reason,
| totally missed the first point in my comment?
|
| > Do you know their reasons for discontinuing? Are you
| even entitled to know that? It's their private matter.
|
| Fully addressed in the "if you can help it" part of my
| comment.
|
| > You have no idea how entitled you behave.
|
| I have 100% idea how entitled I behave. I don't at all. I
| don't use MinIO. As an employee, I push internally for
| relying on our own infra (but we are quite good at this
| already).
|
| I don't _expect_ open source projects to provide
| binaries. Well, I kinda do if they 've been doing it
| though. Expectations vs entitlement? Not the same thing.
|
| We're discussing human interactions and expectations
| here.
|
| ---
|
| So, in your opinion, what's the point of providing pre-
| built binaries if you don't want others to be able to
| rely on them then?
|
| As someone who develops free software in my hobbies and
| also as an employee, if I provide binaries for free, I
| 100% expect people to be able to rely on them, or I just
| don't do it, and I would 100% feel like I'd be causing
| them issues by stopping doing it on short notice. I would
| feel like I'd owe them explanations (and their can be
| valid ones I'm sure - burn out would be a hell of a valid
| explanation to stop working on the projects at all) if I
| did that. They'd not be entitled to receive the binaries
| from me, but they would expect it and breaking
| expectations is not very nice. I have difficulties seeing
| this another way to be honest.
|
| Let's also recall that we are talking about a project
| who's business might have benefited from the adoption in
| the first place.
|
| > why do you care?
|
| I could care about nothing, but that's not what I'm on HN
| for. I'm curious and interested.
|
| You can read more about my views on this stuff here if it
| can help understand me:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667271
| ndriscoll wrote:
| If you were relying on their pre-built binaries, you
| presumably still have them. It's not like they went and
| deleted them off of your computer. They're just not
| giving you _new_ pre-built binaries (but they 're still
| giving you new code for free! And others pre-build
| binaries for free anyway). Do the old ones stop working
| at some point?
|
| Note that a CVE is not an indication that something
| doesn't work. In the real world, they're mostly relevant
| only for businesses that need something like PCI
| compliance. _Especially_ for something like a storage
| server that shouldn 't be directly exposed to the
| Internet. If you are a business that has some compliance
| obligation, you have no one to blame but yourself if you
| rely on others' charity to meet that obligation.
| jraph wrote:
| Existing binaries don't stop working, but adapting your
| infra to get the update can take some time.
|
| Without other elements, it's definitely not nice to stop
| releasing the binaries out of the blue, especially for a
| security fix. To me it's purely a question of breaking
| expectations you've built yourself (I don't mean
| entitlement, I mean expectations).
|
| Now, it's indeed not the end of the world, and:
|
| > you have no one to blame but yourself if you rely on
| others' charity to meet that obligation
|
| 100% agree with you on this (that's my first point in my
| original comment).
| arghwhat wrote:
| There is absolutely nothing malicious or suspicious about
| deciding not to provide docker images or binaries. Doing so
| does not hide or guard you against CVE's, which are entirely
| unrelated to such optional processes.
|
| Building minio is not only trivial, but is standard procedure
| - the latest release is in my distributions standard package
| repo, and they would not use prebuilt binaries. If you want
| that dockerized, the Dockerfile is shorter than the command-
| line to run said container. Dealing with Docker themselves,
| the corporation that has famously gone on a tax collection
| spree, is however quite the pain in the arse for a company.
|
| I can't stand the entitlement people (everyone, not one
| particular person) feel when they are provided things for
| free. Sure, minio is run by a corporation these days and this
| applies a bit more to smaller FOSS projects, but the
| complaint is that the silver spoon got replaced with a
| stainless steel one. You're still being fed for free, despite
| having done nothing for it.
|
| </rant>
| fragmede wrote:
| If it were for a feature request, it would feel more
| justified. People feeling entitled to making feature
| requests is one thing. Like they can get fucked. Contribute
| code or pay me. But if I let something loose out into the
| world that suddenly started causing problems because
| someone discovered you could stab people with it, I'd be
| going around making sure all of the copies I gave out it
| had a knife guard put in place.
| arghwhat wrote:
| We're not going around making kitchen knives illegal. I
| would go out of my way to mitigate footguns where an
| entirely legitimate use or legitimate source of confusion
| would turn foul, but if you chose to go out of your way
| to misuse it as a hammer or ignore documentation, then
| you're on your own.
|
| In this case, we're not even talking about that though,
| it's just a redundant prebuilt binary getting janked. I
| don't think it makes sense to provide prebuild binaries
| in the first place.
| weli wrote:
| > There is absolutely nothing malicious or suspicious about
| deciding not to provide docker images or binaries. Doing so
| does not hide or guard you against CVE's, which are
| entirely unrelated to such optional processes.
|
| Agree. But that's not my point. If you start an oss project
| from scratch and you don't want to provide builds that's
| fine.
|
| If you start your oss project, provide public docker images
| since the beginning, start getting traction, create a
| commercial scheme for you to monetize the project and then
| suddenly make a rug pull on the public builds; _that_ is
| indeed irresponsible, and borderline malicious when you do
| it without: 1. sufficient warning time. 2. after a recent
| cve.
|
| Is it malicious? I don't know. I prefer to believe in
| Hanlon's razor. Is it irresponsible? 100% yes.
| arghwhat wrote:
| It is also not irresponsible, or a rug pull. The project
| is still available, free, and widely packaged as it
| always has been, just one redundant source removed.
|
| I don't get why one they would provide prebuilt binaries
| in the first place, and removing them is just cleanup.
| barnabee wrote:
| It's irresponsible to use open source software, be it a
| docker image or the application itself, if you're not
| willing to maintain it or replace it yourself at short
| notice if what the maintainer is willing to do/publish no
| longer meets your needs.
|
| Don't like it? Stop being a parasite and pay someone for
| a support contract.
| 0x6c6f6c wrote:
| As far as I can tell, people who are paying for support
| contracts were also impacted by this. It was explicitly
| called out in that thread
| 1dom wrote:
| > I can't stand the entitlement people (everyone, not one
| particular person) feel when they are provided things for
| free.
|
| Does it make you less frustrated to remember that humans
| are pattern recognition machines and our existence is
| essentially recognising and adapting to patterns, and so
| when someone does something repeatedly - regardless of if
| they're doing it for free - humans will recognise a pattern
| and adapt to it.
|
| This is an inevitable consequence of coexisting with
| humans: if someone does something repeatedly, it creates an
| expectation. This is how learning works. If someone stops
| doing something, people are going to mention the
| consequences of their expectation not being met. Framing
| that as entitlement doesn't seem productive, especially in
| situations like this where it looks like the change wasn't
| properly communicated.
|
| I don't think there can be a world where humans are able to
| learn/adapt/be efficient whilst not having expectations.
|
| I believe there could be a world where people don't get
| pejoratively labelled as entitled for expressing the
| inconvenience caused by having functionality removed.
| dorian-graph wrote:
| Why not talk about other parts of coexisting with humans?
| Parasitical relationships, having to learn and adapt,
| communicating your needs instead of making assumptions,
| etc.?
| Propelloni wrote:
| Funny that pattern recognition does not extend to the
| universal pattern of "things end". A stoic would be
| appalled--if they'd care.
| arghwhat wrote:
| > Does it make you less frustrated
|
| No. There is no valid justification, and the suggestion
| otherwise suggests a lack of understanding of what
| exactly these rude individuals are demanding.
|
| The very least people can do when receiving such quite
| extensive voluntary favors and dedication from others is
| to be polite and show proper gratitude and appreciation.
| Otherwise, they are not worth the personal and
| uncompensated sacrifice of time (a quite non-renewable
| reosurce) and personal health required for the support.
| They are not even worth the stress or brain cycles
| required for communication.
|
| (Not saying there aren't plenty of people showing
| appreciation - otherwise we would have given up on FOSS
| entirely a long time ago - just talking about those that
| _don 't_)
| 1dom wrote:
| > No. There is no valid justification, and the suggestion
| otherwise suggests a lack of understanding of what
| exactly these rude individuals are demanding.
|
| Like I said, the fact that people are human, and that
| minios did a thing repeatedly, is why the expectation is
| there. Saying it's not justified is like saying the sky
| isn't justified being blue, getting upset and frustrated
| about it is even more silly.
|
| There's no need for people to be rude, I agree, but I
| don't really see any people being disproportionately rude
| in their comments, especially in the context of a
| provider who pulled part of their provisions without fair
| warning.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > Dealing with Docker themselves, the corporation that has
| famously gone on a tax collection spree, is however quite
| the pain in the arse for a company
|
| so its a communications issue? if minio or whoever explains
| this, OK. that's not what happened, so it's not what
| happened.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > When you always published and built Docker images for the
| public you are creating an expectation
|
| That expectation does not entitle anybody to anything though.
|
| > people will rely on that and will chose your software based
| on that expectation
|
| That is their decision. Without any contract or promise,
| there is no obligation to anybody.
|
| > You suddenly deciding that you won't be offering updated
| Docker images [...] is approaching malicious-level actions.
|
| I really don't get this entitlement. "You are still doing
| unpaid work I benefit from, but you used to do more,
| therefore you are malicious." is something I really cannot
| get behind.
| jphoward wrote:
| Have you not seen some of the replies at the link?
|
| For example:
|
| "You are joking ?!
|
| The commit about source only is 4 days old (9e49d5e)
|
| We are currently paying for a license while using the open
| source version, you already removed the oidc code from UI
| console and now docker images. We are not happy by this
| lock-in. We will discuss this internally, but you may loose
| a paying customer with this behavior."
| jamespo wrote:
| Why would a paying customer use the open source version?
| Deployment in non-prod?
| fires10 wrote:
| I do this frequently. To prevent vendor lock in and allow
| us to easily pivot if pricing gets out line. We pay to
| support the project and get technical support when
| needed. Considering how little we use technical support.
| It should be a good deal for the company.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| For one: Using open source version often is a lot
| simpler. Commercial versions are hidden behind
| authentication and other weird systems to download. User
| experience can be a lot better.
|
| Then there are ideological reasons: Purposly trying to
| make the open source version sustainable.
|
| And then reduced lockin etc. by not using Enterprise only
| features by accident/convenience, which leaves the door
| open to leave the contract.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Because I want to give a project money but also want to
| make 5000% sure the entire thing is in github, working,
| the latest, compiling and that we can do all of that all
| of the time? What is strange about that?
| DannyBee wrote:
| "That expectation does not entitle anybody to anything
| though."
|
| This is true legally, but not otherwise (socially,
| practically)
|
| "That is their decision. Without any contract or promise,
| there is no obligation to anybody."
|
| Again, true legally, but IMHO a really silly position to
| take overall.
|
| Imagine I provide free electricity to everyone in my town.
| I encourage everyone to use it. I do it all for free. I'm
| very careful to ensure the legal framework means i have no
| obligation, and everyone knows i have no obligations to
| them legally. They all take me up on it. All the other
| providers wither and die as a result. 15 years later, i
| decide to shut it all down on a whim because i want to move
| on to other things. The lights go out for the town
| everywhere.
|
| Saying "i have no legal obligations" is true, but expecting
| people to not be pissed off, complain, and expect me to not
| do this is at best, naive.
|
| Calling them entitled is even funnier. It's sort of
| irrelevant if they are entitled or not, after i put them in
| this position.
|
| Legal obligation is not the only form of obligation, and
| not even the interesting ones most of the time.
|
| More importantly - society has never survived on legal
| obligation alone.
|
| I do not think you would enjoy living in a world where
| legal obligation is the only thing that mattered.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Bad analogy, MinIO isn't a basic commodity required for
| life.
|
| Maybe a car analogy (because they hardly work). It's like
| lending your car to someone everyday then stopping, then
| the person complains that they have no way to get around.
| But there is walking, biking, busses or buying your own
| car.
| ishouldbework wrote:
| Electricity is not a basic commodity required for life.
| It is convenient for sure.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| I don't see how "basic commodity required for life" is a
| necessary criteria for any ethical standards to apply at
| all. This is about trust, community and how to be a good
| project steward.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| Then will you be volunteering your time and resources?
| Remember: once you start volunteering, you cannot stop,
| because you will "break everyone's trust and
| expectations" or even be "malicious". Happy volunteering.
| aendruk wrote:
| The claim isn't that "you cannot stop", but that it's
| rude to not communicate about that ahead of time.
|
| Of course the entitlement to volunteer work is also rude,
| and in my opinion worse.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| This is exactly what happens when you volunteer. When
| you've had enough, or just want to spend your time in
| other ways, you're hounded to come back, to continue to
| help, and to varying degrees made to feel guilty because
| you decided to stop doing something that you had been
| offering for free.
|
| I don't think this is a reason to never volunteer but you
| have to develop a thick skin, know where your lines are,
| and at some point politely but firmly say "no."
| Hendrikto wrote:
| This is a bad analogy. We are talking about building a
| very simple Docker image.
|
| It is more like you went around your neighborhood and
| turned peoples lights on in the evening, then stopped.
|
| Sure, it's a lost convenience, but people can easily
| choose to just... push the button themselves. Or pay
| somebody to continue doing it for them. Or get a timer.
|
| It's really not a big deal, and there are plenty of
| alternatives.
| weli wrote:
| I think you are missing the point of legal vs societal
| obligations and your analogy is equally bad. Minio's sold
| you this free light bulb and they also freely offered the
| service to upgrade it to the newest version every time a
| new lightbulb was released. There are many light bulb
| brands out there, some paid, some free, most of them also
| offer the service to upgrade the lightbulb automatically,
| even the free ones.
|
| Then Minio decided to disable the feature to upgrade the
| lightbulb automatically, the code to update it is still
| there, they just don't want to do it anymore.
| Conveniently there is a Minio+ enterprise plan that has
| this feature. But hey! they tell you that you can easily
| set up your own server to update your lightbulb
| automatically. And most enterprise clients or people who
| have Minio lightbulbs in their office will do that.
|
| But for single enthusiasts who don't have a server
| because they are just running a Minio lightbulb in their
| shed it's a bad situation, because if they knew this from
| the beginning they would have gone with another free
| lightbulb that updated automatically.
|
| In short: Minio has the legal right to do whatever they
| want, people using minio have the right to be pissed.
| It's an all around bad publicity stunt and if I was a
| Minio investor I would really wonder why they are trying
| to piss off their loyal user base for a quick buck.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| > But for single enthusiasts who don't have a server
| because they are just running a Minio lightbulb in their
| shed it's a bad situation, because if they knew this from
| the beginning they would have gone with another free
| lightbulb that updated automatically.
|
| What keeps those enthusiasts from setting up a scheduled
| GitHub Action (or whatever system they prefer to use) to
| build the image for themselves?
|
| How much (amortized) effort are we actually talking about
| here? One minute per release?
| hansmayer wrote:
| Well, if you use --no-cache flag, maybe even 3 mins...
| But it's too much for the entitled "it costs them like 0
| to keep building images for us"-crowd
| edoceo wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity for someone to fulfill their
| own "societal obligations" and contribute back to the
| community they've benefited (taken) from.
| Bengalilol wrote:
| All those people lurking while no one gets the idea to
| "ok, then I'll do the job for all of you" thing seems
| like the societal contract has been broken long ago.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I agree, but it is always harder to have someone fill a
| void for a previously solved problem. I think they
| eventually will, but it's almost like maintenance
| programming vs. greenfield development; it's a harder
| task that's not much fun, plus the interpretation that
| you need to do a buch of work for something you
| previously already had. Ill-will towards MinIO is
| completely understandable.
| cxr wrote:
| > I think you are missing the point of legal vs societal
| obligations and your analogy is equally bad
|
| There are a lot of paragraphs in this thread laying the
| groundwork for this subtle strawman, but neither you nor
| DannyBee are addressing the real opposing position.
| That's the one that says there is no legal obligation and
| there is no social obligation. You're both treating the
| latter as if agreement about its existence is a forgone
| conclusion not in dispute. But of course it's in dispute.
| It's the basis of the dispute.
| RobGR wrote:
| The point is not about what Minio's legally required
| obligations are.
|
| The point is, there is a community project, and Minio has
| revealed they are leaving the community. It's not illegal
| that they do so, any more than divorce is illegal, but
| it's concerning to anyone who views themselves as part of
| that community.
|
| It raises a point that is it smart to join a new
| community that depends on the same people or
| organization.
|
| Your persistent inability to comprehend this makes you
| look like a poor candidate for future professional
| collaboration. Maybe you are autistic, maybe just a
| shill, but it's not helping you.
| rizzom5000 wrote:
| Maybe I'm autistic, but in this thread is appears that
| one side is making a rational argument, and the other is
| an appeal to emotion.
|
| A feeling of a community is not a contract. Complaining
| about losing that community changes nothing; and I
| believe that's the point GP is making.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| OK - I live in a place that's snowy for a lot of the
| year. I shovel not only my sidewalk but my neighbours'
| several houses on both sides. People are really happy and
| grateful. Over the years Mr. Johnson the senior on a
| fixed pension next door loses mobility and is really
| appreciative I keep his walk clean. The couple next to
| him has a new baby and a clear sidewalk helps them load
| up all the accompanying gear into the car. My snowbird
| neighbours are happy that their walk is accessible when
| they're out of town. The dad who walks several kids to
| school is happy there's less snow to trudge through twice
| a day (in both directions). The mail carrier is less
| likely to slip and is grateful. Dog walkers and (crazy)
| winter joggers don't even consciously realize the
| improvement but still benefit.
|
| Then I decide to stop. It doesn't really matter why, I
| wasn't getting paid or had not made any sort of formal
| agreement or promise, I just don't want to do it anymore.
| Now I shovel my sidewalk to the property line exactly and
| that's it. Hey, that's my legal obligation; I don't need
| to do any more! Mr. Johnson now has a lot more trouble
| getting out of his house; we see him a lot less. The baby
| is crying while new mom slips around trying to load up
| strollers and diaper bags and a car seat. The snowbirds
| just got fined by city bylaw for not clearing their walk.
| That dad's school trip is just a little longer, colder
| and unpleasant.
|
| Hey, this isn't my fault! All those people took my effort
| for granted; I never promised to shovel their walks! They
| have no basis to judge me! But you better believe that
| this decision reduced their assessment that I'm a "good
| neighbour". Community is built mostly on implicit
| agreements, norms and conventions that are established
| through practice & conduct over time. You're arguing the
| right/wrong of this in the face of legal formalizations,
| while others are just saying it is a fact, not weighing
| the benefits and obligations.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Actually, in your analogy the reason why you stopped
| matters a great deal. For example, if you stopped
| shoveling snow because you are sick/injured, or because
| you are caring for a family member, nobody would think
| less of you as a neighbor. It's only if you stopped for a
| selfish reason that people would negatively judge your
| neighborliness. So to the extent that the analogy is
| instructive as to how we should think about MinIO's
| actions, we would have to judge the reason why they did
| this and decide whether that is worth thinking less of
| them.
| sigbottle wrote:
| I mean, fair, but again, notice you're trying to
| actually, idk, understand the situation, use empathy.
|
| I see GGP's comment attitude all too frequently on the
| internet ("nobody is entitled to anything") as the
| default. Which is such a nasty connotative strawman, it's
| kind of absurd. But hey, that's the internet for you.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| There is an important point you are missing. Attitudes
| like this discourage people from doing nice things for
| others in general. Because you are saying that one nice
| deed or nice deeds for a period of time mean you are
| bound to have to do that deed forever for free.
|
| This is the tragedy of the commons but not just for a
| field of grass, instead its for all human altruism. You
| really need to think about the consequences of this
| attitude because it doesn't lead where you seem to think
| it leads. In fact, it leads to exactly the opposite set
| of human behaviors.
|
| PS The neighbors could easily just contract someone else
| to do the shoveling in the future and instead of being
| salty about having to pay, looking at it as how much
| money they saved in the past.
| sarchertech wrote:
| We had some neighbors that used it throw a big Halloween
| celebration. They gave out drinks and snacks, dressed up
| in very elaborate costumes, setup movies on outdoor
| projectors, and do hayrides.
|
| They didn't do it last year. I was disappointed, but I'm
| not angry at them. I realize that they were spending a
| lot of time and energy and maybe they are just burned
| out.
|
| I'm sure there are people who are angry and judge them.
| But those people are spoiled, entitled brats.
|
| The distinction is that it is entirely fine to be
| disappointed. It's not fine to get angry.
| cies wrote:
| Did you read the comments on Github (linked by the
| title)?
|
| So many commenters are just plain rude. They got free
| value for along time. Someone giving the free value
| decides to allocate their time otherwise. And the long-
| time receivers of the free value now cannot behave.
|
| And you seem to make excuses for them...
|
| It's just rude to behave like that after having enjoyed
| gifts for so long. They behave like spoiled children.
| Nothing to defend IMHO.
| jamespo wrote:
| Github is awash with accounts with zero contributions to
| anything who use it to lobby for their personal
| requirements.
| imiric wrote:
| This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of OSS.
|
| You're essentially saying that only users who contribute
| to OSS are worthy of attention and support. This is no
| different than saying that only commercial users, or
| those from specific countries, backgrounds, or industries
| are worthy of the same.
|
| Those users who create issues, request features, and,
| yes, ask for support, are as valuable as those who
| contribute code or money. They're all part of the same
| community of users that help build a successful product.
| And they do it for _free_ for you, because they 're
| passionate about the product itself.
|
| If you think otherwise then you should make your terms of
| service explicit by using a restrictive license and
| business model. OSS is not for you.
|
| Yes, some people can be rude, demanding, and unworthy of
| your attention. But you make those boundaries clear, not
| treat all non-paying users as entitled children.
| geodel wrote:
| > But you make those boundaries clear, not treat all non-
| paying users as entitled children.
|
| True in theory but no one has infinite time to
| distinguish correctly between good feature requester or
| bad one.
| evanelias wrote:
| > If you think otherwise then you should make your terms
| of service explicit
|
| FOSS licenses already do that: they shout at you in all-
| caps that the authors PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT
| WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.
|
| Meanwhile the licenses don't say anything about
| communities.
|
| For better or worse, OSI convinced everyone that "open
| source" is synonymous with using specific licenses that
| meet their definition. If that's the case, then how can
| it be a "fundamental misunderstanding of OSS" to strictly
| interpret OSS by the terms of the licenses, which don't
| mention any sort of "social contract", while they _do_
| include language explicitly contrary to such expectations
| of users?
| imiric wrote:
| > how can it be a "fundamental misunderstanding of OSS"
| to strictly interpret OSS by the terms of the licenses,
| which don't mention any sort of "social contract", while
| they do include language explicitly contrary to such
| expectations of users?
|
| Because free and open-source software is more than a set
| of licenses approved by some governing body.
|
| It is part of a social movement and ideology pursuing the
| open sharing of knowledge, and building communities
| around this where everyone can benefit, not just a select
| few. Software is one aspect of this, due to its roots in
| the hacker counterculture of the 1970s, but the core idea
| extends beyond it.
|
| You can read more about this in many places. Bruce Perens
| specifically refers to a "social contract" in this early
| post[1] on the Debian mailing list. This is what is
| usually referred to as the "spirit" of open source, and
| is not strictly encoded in any official definition. The
| success of OSS depends on implicit mutual trust and
| respect, not on explicit rules and licenses.
|
| [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-
| announce/1997/msg00017.html
| evanelias wrote:
| Many open source projects have never opted-in to a social
| movement or ideological pursuit. Software meeting the
| OSI's definition can unarguably be called "open source"
| without any other implications of an ill-defined "spirit"
| which is completely subjective.
|
| If I host a code repo on an otherwise static site, with
| no ability to contact the author or engage in a
| community, it is still widely considered "open source" if
| it uses an OSI-approved license.
|
| Likewise if I host the same code repo on Github and
| disable issues and set the pull request template to say
| "All PRs will be closed and I will shout expletives at
| you for wasting my time", if it uses an OSI-approved
| license then it is still open source per the OSI's own
| definition.
| imiric wrote:
| > Without any contract or promise, there is no obligation
| to anybody.
|
| When a restaurant which you've been going to for years one
| day decides to serve you your favorite meal with a bit of
| poop on the side, do you not have the right to be upset
| about it? They're not under any obligation to serve you
| meals you're happy with. There was no contract or promise.
| The fact you're paying for their service doesn't buy you
| these rights either. Those are just the terms of service
| both parties have agreed to.
|
| Similarly, open source software is much more than a
| license. There is a basic social contract of not being an
| asshole to users of your product, which is an unwritten
| rule not just in software and industry in general, but in
| society as a whole. The free software movement is an
| extension of this mindset, and focuses on building software
| for the benefit of everyone, not just those who happen to
| pay for it, or those who meet your specific criteria.
| Claiming you support this philosophy, while acting against
| it, is hypocritical, and abusive towards people who do
| believe in it. And your point is that that people who
| complain about this are entitled? Give me a break.
|
| If you want to place restrictions on how your software is
| used and who gets to enjoy it, that's fine, but make those
| terms explicit by choosing the appropriate license and
| business model from the start. Stop abusing OSS as a
| marketing tactic.[1]
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45666757
| Ekaros wrote:
| Why isn't there similar expectations for users of Open
| source? That is be ready to take over yourself if
| maintainers do not want to do something anymore? Do not
| ask or demand anything. Do not expect anything but the
| code. To understand that you can not expect or be
| entitled to anything. And celebrate what you get just
| now.
|
| With this the solution becomes obvious. You select piece
| of technology to build on you are fully and ready to take
| over it for purposes you want to use for it. The code is
| shared and you should not expect anything more.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I think you are digging in a little too hard here. If
| someone offers a capability that you don't have, and you
| build that into something you use, then saying that they
| should be ready for it to go away at any time and be
| happy to have had it, seems a little too much.
|
| If there had never been an offer, they would not have
| built around it, and would have found another solution
| and, even if harder or more inconvenient, learned how to
| use that and built around that. Sure, no one is obligated
| to continue to provide them with the product, but saying
| that they are being unreasonable for expecting a little
| bit of warning time before having support pulled is a bit
| unrealistic.
|
| I know we have done the metaphors to death already, but
| let's try another one: imagine if someone gave you a ride
| to work every day for years and one morning they didn't
| show up and you couldn't get in touch with them. You
| should have had a backup plan, and you shouldn't have
| depended on them, but it will take you a while to find a
| car and rearrange your schedule and learn how to drive or
| whatever you have to do, and all they had to do was
| notify you a month or two earlier that they wouldn't be
| able to do it anymore.
| rapnie wrote:
| Metaphor I often see in FOSS. You are this hobby painter
| sitting every morning on Monmartre square in Paris,
| painting. It attracts people's eyes. They love your work
| and you become a sensation, going viral. Instagram
| influencers from around the world just _need_ you in
| their picture, they say. You just shrug and paint. One
| day you got bored of Monmartre. Of pleasing the crowds.
| You want rest, a spot in nature to paint in peace. When
| the crowd learns, an angry oproar bursts out, and people
| _demand_ you stick to your familiar spot, or else.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Mine was much better.
| imiric wrote:
| If the painter doesn't enjoy painting in public, then
| they should've picked a quiet spot in nature in the first
| place.
|
| And yet, most people who do decide to share their work in
| public, directly or indirectly reap the rewards of it.
| They get exposure and recognition, which in turn opens
| many doors. I'm not saying that exposure alone puts food
| on the table, but it's certainly not entirely negative.
| Many people would envy to be in that position.
|
| Your analogy is akin to any public figure enjoying their
| work, but not enjoying the attention. That certainly
| happens, but the attention, and all its negative aspects,
| comes with the territory. That attention might even be
| partly responsible for getting them to where they are.
| People in such line of work must learn to live with their
| choices. Not be surprised when their audience has certain
| demands and expectations, which may or may not be within
| reason.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > If the painter doesn't enjoy painting in public, then
| they should've picked a quiet spot in nature in the first
| place.
|
| Sure but maybe the changed their mind or just got burned
| out.
| imiric wrote:
| And that's fine too. Someone else may or may not continue
| their work for the benefit of the community. They can be
| honest about it, and most people will be understanding
| and thankful for their work.
|
| But that is not what happened in the case of MinIO, and
| many other projects. They deliberately removed features
| from the software, and made it more difficult to use.
| They prioritized working on their commercial product, and
| used the "community edition" as a marketing funnel for
| it. This is what I'm objecting to.
|
| In any case, I've made my point clear, and don't like
| repeating myself. Cheers!
| sarchertech wrote:
| >Someone else may or may not continue their work for the
| benefit of the community.
|
| Someone still can. They can't revoke the AGPL license of
| previous versions.
|
| >They prioritized working on their commercial product
|
| It's a company, not a non-profit. What else would you
| expect them to do?
|
| I'm less understanding when a VC backed company does
| things like this, but many times its just a matter of "we
| were trying to make money by doing X. X is no longer
| working, so we're moving to Y".
|
| I've also seen hostile mobs form when very small
| companies or individuals decide to start charging for
| things they used to give away for free, so it's not just
| that they are a VC backed company here.
| geodel wrote:
| Huh, even employment nowadays doesn't come with month or
| two notice from employers. And here some one giving
| things gratis need to issue notice lest you might be
| inconvenienced.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Do you actually want everyone to treat everyone else like
| employers treat their employees? I don't think that is as
| good of an argument as you think it is.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| You're more annoying than the people you complain about.
| imiric wrote:
| > Why isn't there similar expectations for users of Open
| source? That is be ready to take over yourself if
| maintainers do not want to do something anymore?
|
| Of course there is. Which is why many hostile projects
| get forked.
|
| "That is the beauty of OSS", I hear you say. And I agree,
| but most people aren't developers. Even those who are,
| might not be familiar with the technology to continue
| maintaining the project. And even those who are, will
| still need time and effort to understand the codebase at
| a level that they're comfortable with maintaining it. And
| even those who are interested in all of that, might not
| do a good job at it.
|
| So, ultimately, it is a very small subset of users who
| would not only have the capability to continue
| maintenance, but would manage to do as well as the
| original maintainers for the benefit of the entire
| community.
|
| Most people saw an interesting piece of software, gave it
| a try and enjoyed it, and, if the project is successful,
| would probably like to continue using it. When the
| original developer ignores or is actively hostile towards
| these users, you're saying that they have no right to be
| upset about it? That's what I find ridiculous.
|
| Yes, some people can be demanding and annoying, but
| that's true regardless if they're a paying customer, a
| contributor, or a "freeloader". The way you deal with
| this is by communicating and setting clear boundaries,
| not by alienating your user base.
| gkbrk wrote:
| > If you want to place restrictions on how your software
| is used and who gets to enjoy it, that's fine, but make
| those terms explicit by choosing the appropriate license
| and business model from the start. Stop abusing OSS as a
| marketing tactic.
|
| But MinIO didn't do any of that. They're still a 100%
| open-source project, with the proper license.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > The fact you're paying for their service doesn't buy
| you these rights either.
|
| It certainly does. In the UK and many other countries
| (possibly not the US), as soon as you are paying for a
| good or service you are entitled that it is satisfactory
| quality, fit for purpose and as described. I think it's
| uncontentious that a meal at a restaurant that includes
| poo is not satisfactory quality. Businesses have less
| rights than consumers but this would still count.
| However, the restaurant is certainly free to refuse
| serving you at all (unless they're it's because of a
| protected characteristic e.g. because of your race or
| gender).
|
| I'm not sure how much that affects your analogy since it
| was probably a bit too far removed from the original
| situation to be useful anyway.
| imiric wrote:
| > It certainly does.
|
| No, it doesn't. Yes, there are general safety regulations
| in any country, but there are no hard rules as to what
| "satisfactory" or "fit for purpose" means.
|
| My analogy was contrived to make a point. Of course
| serving actual feces is not "satisfactory". But I imagine
| that you can extrapolate my analogy into an infinite
| number of possibilities where someone who once enjoyed
| certain services or products can find them not
| "satisfactory" anymore. That is a commonplace situation
| in any marketplace, and it is perfectly valid for the
| person on the receiving end to be upset about it.
|
| The one hole you can poke at my analogy, which I
| anticipated, is that there is (typically) no financial
| transaction between users and developers of free
| software. But my response to this is that a financial
| transaction is not a requirement for the social contract
| to be established with users of _any_ product or service,
| regardless of its distribution or business model. Those
| users can still expect a certain level of service, and
| understandably so. This expectation exists whether the
| person is a customer or not.
|
| A closer analogy might be a community kitchen, or garden.
| But it really makes no difference to my argument.
|
| The free software philosophy is agnostic to how software
| is monetized. It's true that it is more difficult to do
| so than with proprietary software, but it's certainly not
| impossible. Many companies have been built and thrive on
| producing free software. The crucial thing, regardless of
| the business model, is to treat _all_ your users with the
| same amount of respect, dedication, and honesty. The
| moment you stop doing that, don 't be surprised when the
| community pushes back. That's on you, not on "entitled"
| users.
| geodel wrote:
| Truly strange analogy. 1) No restaurant is serving free
| food for years. 2) Serving poop will be really be very
| serious, legal issue even it was served for non-tippers.
|
| Seems like the new definition of open source is not
| license, not code but _What I need others must do for me_
| anothernewdude wrote:
| You seem more entitled to your opinion than others.
|
| > That is their decision. Without any contract or promise,
| there is no obligation to anybody.
|
| Not everything is legally enforced. Open source is a social
| phenomenon. Why are you so surprised that these social
| rules are being enforced socially?
|
| There are obligations... it's how society functions.
|
| > I really don't get this entitlement. "You are still doing
| unpaid work I benefit from, but you used to do more,
| therefore you are malicious." is something I really cannot
| get behind.
|
| I really don't get this entitlement. You expect that nobody
| should follow any social contracts and I'm sure are always
| surprised when people call you out for being asocial.
| walt_grata wrote:
| You're correct and the project isn't entitled to any good
| will or usage from the community either. So they get what
| they get, just like the community. Or you know, everyone
| can just give a shit about each other even if it's a bit
| more effort.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I think if you analyzed your day to day life you'd be
| surprised with how many reliances you have on norms and
| social contracts. I personally don't want to live in a
| world that depends on an explicit legal basis for every
| single thing, and I doubt you want to either.
|
| The GP didn't say it entitled them to anything, but that it
| created a sense of entitlement. You are correct there's no
| contractual obligation to do so, but it was likely a part
| of the decision to go with their solution, i.e. "they make
| it easy to deploy!". It is a very logical conclusion to say
| "they just made it HARDER THAN BEFORE to deploy".
|
| Promises are not always explicit written permission; that's
| why I got in trouble for re-broadcasting major-league
| baseball with only implicit verbal permission (thanks,
| Simpsons!)
| walkabout wrote:
| Calling out shitty behavior doesn't mean you felt
| "entitled" to anything.
|
| Not all shitty behavior is governed by contracts and
| licenses. You can be an asshole without violating the terms
| of a license.
| ryandrake wrote:
| "I'm not legally required to be nice" has become a classic
| and very common HN/Reddit argument. While true, it's kind
| of beside the point. People often go beyond what they are
| legally obligated to do, and other people often expect
| others to go beyond what we are legally obligated to do.
| This is about nice vs. not-nice instead of legal vs.
| illegal.
| tmoertel wrote:
| > > When you always published and built Docker images for
| the public you are creating an expectation
|
| > That expectation does not entitle anybody to anything
| though.
|
| Note that implied contracts do exist, and sometimes
| expectations based on prior conduct do suffice to form an
| enforcable contract. In this case, I don't know whether you
| can reasonably make that argument, but that's never stopped
| enterprising lawyers before.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract
| hansmayer wrote:
| > You suddenly deciding that you won't be offering updated
| Docker images especially after a CVE
|
| I hate to break it to you, but you know the CVEs are fixed in
| the source code, not in the Docker Image? Just build it
| yourself, the good folks have even provided a Dockerfile for
| it.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| This is also becoming a trend with open source projects
| turning into source available projects with obscure and
| hidden ways to deploy them to prevent average users from
| running the software in their homelabs etc.
| jotaen wrote:
| I don't know much about the MinIO project specifically, but
| to me it seems to be a common misconception that just because
| a maintainer provides their software project under a
| permissive license (such as AGPL, MIT, etc.) would
| necessarily imply that they do this for particular ethical
| reasons, like caring about "the community" (whoever that is)
| or contributing something for the greater good.
|
| In the end, it's just software made available under specific
| terms. While I understand the inconvenience for users if
| things change, it feels like part of the disappointment might
| stem from one-sided expectations.
| __s wrote:
| Compare to bitnami:
| https://github.com/bitnami/charts/issues/35164
|
| Recently switched from bitnami to minio here, with plenty
| heads up & they scheduled brown outs etc, along with legacy
| images to fallback on for users who don't get informed by
| anything until image gone
| grandfugue wrote:
| It's legit. Just gives people the impression that it is
| sabotaging the community. I understand why they do it (the more
| inconvenience the more likely people are gonna pay), but wish
| companies are more thoughtful on open sourcing code and how to
| differentiate enterprise offerings at the beginning, rather
| than playing tricks after gaining tractions.
| Aeolun wrote:
| They are entitled to stop building docker images. Their users
| are entitled to get salty and go find alternative products.
|
| If that is Minio's expectation, then all is good, but it seems
| kinda counterproductive? I never liked minio, but I certainly
| wouldn't use it after seeing them _remove_ features.
| jinkylist wrote:
| >I certainly wouldn't use it after seeing them remove
| features.
|
| All sorts of projects remove features all the time though,
| even the linux kernel drops support for hardware that may or
| may not be in use somewhere
|
| >Their users are entitled to get salty and go find
| alternative products.
|
| People are entitled to feeling things of course, others will
| only point out that it may not be justified and that the user
| is liable to get hurt again if they never adjust their
| expectations to meet reality
| duskwuff wrote:
| I think (and I suspect many users would agree) that there
| is a big difference between "we are removing some
| unmaintained drivers for a piece of hardware which almost
| no one is using" and "we are removing a tentpole feature
| from the 'open-source' version of our application and
| making it exclusive to the paid edition".
| sneak wrote:
| They removed the admin UI from the web frontend in the f/oss
| version some months ago, too. I updated for security reasons
| and they'd stripped the functionality out. It's a jerk move.
|
| MinIO is open source cosplay.
|
| I wrote this back in July:
| https://sneak.berlin/20250720/minio-are-assholes/
| gear54rus wrote:
| Or one can just use old images. Which is what many people
| started doing after their other fuckup - removing perfectly
| working web UI from free version.
|
| They just can't stop shooting themselves in the foot that
| didn't even heal from last time.
|
| The last tag with a working web UI is
| RELEASE.2025-04-22T22-12-26Z btw.
| jamesnorden wrote:
| Terrible advice when a CVE is being discussed.
| Klemoniono wrote:
| Company makes Open Source. Open Source community enbraces it,
| helps it to become the defacto standard.
|
| Company does a rug pull because they are unable to make a
| proper business out of it and leaves the community hanging dry.
|
| Removing the container image build step, which was ALREADY
| THERE, and doing this internaly only, is the gatekeeping they
| are now doing.
|
| Its like 0 effort to provide these images.
|
| And yes pricing pages like this is always the same: You don't
| get any deal below 1k / month minimum because they have some
| pre-sales people and a payment pipeline which doesn't work for
| anything small or startup like.
|
| Somehow i don't get MinIO anyway. They got over 100 Million of
| investment for an S3 system. Its basically a done product. Its
| also a typical 'invest once build it once, keep it running'
| thing which can easily be replicated with a little bit of
| investment from other companies.
|
| I have no clue how they ever got valued over 100 Million.
| hansmayer wrote:
| > Its like 0 effort to provide these images.
|
| I love it when entitled folks both expect to use someone
| else's work AND immediately downplay someone else's effort
| (no, I am not affiliated with Min.IO, just saying if you are
| scared of building a docker image yourself, maybe you should
| not downplay someone else's effort).
| Klemoniono wrote:
| I'm not scared at all and could care less about building
| the image myself.
|
| I'm also not 'entitled' because i'm doing this for another
| open source project we are now maintaining.
|
| Just to be clear: THEY already have to maintain the docker
| image and it makes it less secure for EVERYONE if the
| community now needs to either find a new github
| repo/company building it for them or everyone has to build
| it themselves because they do not trust random companies.
|
| There is a difference between having the official Min.IO
| image with a stamp of approval vs. forked repos with their
| version of the same image. The only thing fixing this kind
| of issue is a fingerprint and build caches.
|
| They are removing the official container images because 1.
| this is the magic source of running your software in helm
| charts etc. so now you need to act 2. in some companies you
| are not allowed to use random container images
|
| And you are complelty ignoring my arguments. Its not
| entitlement if a companies product becomes the industry
| standard due to Open Source and then doing a rug pull like
| this.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| > makes it less secure for EVERYONE if the community now
| needs to either find a new github repo/company
|
| Correct, and that's the most worrying aspect.
| hansmayer wrote:
| > Just to be clear: THEY already have to maintain the
| docker image and it makes it less secure for EVERYONE if
| the community now needs to either find a new github
| repo/company building it for them or everyone has to
| build it themselves because they do not trust random
| companies.
|
| Wrong - it would be less secure if they did not share the
| source code and the Dockerfile along that too. As long as
| you take care to regularly update, where is the problem?
| Klemoniono wrote:
| So just to be clear, they publish the docker image, they
| have an Github action which is basically free for them to
| build and release it into a free registry but they don't
| do it.
|
| So i setup everything to do this on my github with their
| code and publish it on my package.
|
| And you don't think this is stupid?
|
| The problem is the critisim how they act and even if they
| release everything and its just building the image, you
| can't trust another source to upload the image someone
| else has build with this file. So now everyone has to
| build the same image.
| hansmayer wrote:
| The scenario you described is mainly just benefiting you.
| Whether Min.IO loses or wins something based on this
| decision, will remain to be seen. In either case they
| don't owe it either to me or to you to provide a built
| image, especially as they continue to provide the source,
| including the Dockerfile. In either case if in your setup
| you are not able to rebuild an image off of a Dockerfile,
| your setup is worth rethinking. Not to mention that on
| the security side, it's quite irresponsible to depend on
| an image from a public repo, without at least pulling it
| through an internal artifact management system with
| vulnerability scanning.
| jmorenoamor wrote:
| But a properly built image is a nice part of a product release.
|
| Building a quality production ready image is not trivial, and
| it's always welcomed from the vendor.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "It's an Open Source project - I don't understand what people
| are complaining about. Noone is entitled to receive free Docker
| images. "
|
| While this is true, in all of these discussions, somewhere the
| notion of responsibility often gets lost.
|
| If you publish a project, encourage people to use it, promote
| it heavily, etc, then get lots of users, and then decide to
| kill it, while it's true you legally owe nobody anything, it's
| sort of crazy to claim people are acting entitled when they
| complain.
|
| After all, you encouraged people to use it and promoted it!
|
| Again, do you legally owe them anything? Nope.
|
| I am much more empathetic towards those who get surprised by
| the growth of their projects, or otherwise didn't try to make
| their project popular and decide to quit when it becomes too
| large too quickly and becomes a burden.
|
| In general, if you try to encourage lots of people to use or do
| something and succeed at that, you end up with various forms of
| social responsibility to those people. That's true in most
| things, not just open source.
|
| Open source does not get a pass at this social reality simply
| because, as a legal reality, those users are not owed anything.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Exactly. looked up their github to see what the big issue was
| about and they still provide the full source + the Dockerfile.
| It's not a huge issue that it is being made into. Does no-one
| know how to build a Docker image any more?
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| > I don't understand what people are complaining about
|
| Talk is cheap. People will complain about something they're not
| legally entitled to because there's no downside, only an upside
| if the company backtracks.
|
| In the background they are probably creating tickets to
| mitigate the risk if the complaining doesn't work. It's
| perfectly rational.
|
| I don't understand the people who don't understand this.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Certainly, there are some pretty entitled people on that github
| issue.
|
| But this attitude is too far the other way. Fair enough, you
| are under no obligation to continue providing a free service.
| But isn't it fair to give a bit of notice before withdrawing
| it? Especially after doing it so consistently for so long. Not
| legally required, sure, but polite.
|
| They haven't even given notice _after_ withdrawing it! They
| just waited for someone to realise and ask about it.
|
| Bear in mind that many paid for services, on a subscription
| basis, technically allow the seller to change (i.e. reduce!)
| the service at any time. If they act in bad faith to their free
| tier, what should you expect about their paid tiers? You could
| argue you also shouldn't be using paid services that could
| behave that way but I think you'd struggle not to.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I agree with what you said, but I think "courteous" might be
| a better word than "fair". Whatever word you use, I take it
| as a sign that unpaid use isn't as welcome as I thought.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's an Open Source project - I don't understand what people
| are complaining about
|
| MinIO is a commercial company that provides some open source
| components and some paid components and services.
|
| This meme where nobody is allowed to be unhappy with anything
| when the phrase "open source" is involved is getting old. In
| the span of two paragraphs your comment discovered why this is
| frustrating people: They have been providing certain things in
| the open source leg of their operation and then yanking them
| and stuffing them under a very expensive commercial leg later,
| after people have begun using them.
|
| Being upset about that is reasonable and understandable, even
| if it triggers some of the people who believe "open source"
| means nobody is allowed to be unhappy with anything, ever.
| sneak wrote:
| Back in July I clarified precisely what people are complaining
| about. It should clear up the matter.
|
| https://sneak.berlin/20250720/minio-are-assholes/
| DSingularity wrote:
| Uh this is a superficial take. It almost certainly took more
| effort to hide the images from the public than to publish them.
|
| The community that made them is being shit on.
| braza wrote:
| > I don't understand what people are complaining about. Noone
| is entitled to receive free Docker images.
|
| Every time I read something like this, I recall this post from
| Rich Hickey[1][2] on why no one is entitled to benefit from
| another human being's goodwill and time.
|
| From the post:
|
| > The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to
| work are people who run projects, and the scope of their
| entitlement extends only to their own projects.
|
| > Just because someone open sources something does not imply
| they owe the world a change in their status, focus and effort,
| e.g. from inventor to community manager.
|
| [1] - https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7b
| a95....
|
| [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123
| lemagedurage wrote:
| But not everything can be "fair game" when providing a
| service for free. Surely it wouldn't have been OK if they
| suddenly included a bitcoin miner or extracted credentials.
| They offered a free service, people trusted it, depended on
| it. Now, in my view, they have some responsibilty to their
| users.
|
| Giving a notice in advance and releasing a final image that
| patched the CVE would've been reasonably responsible.
| jzb wrote:
| You don't understand, or don't agree with the complaints. Those
| are two different things, and I suspect you _understand_ why
| people are complaining and instead _disagree_ with the
| complaints.
|
| People are complaining because something was available, they
| adopted it, then it was discontinued. Apparently with little
| warning, and after they'd been encouraged to adopt it by the
| provider of the images.
|
| As it happens, I _agree_ with the general idea that if folks
| are not paying for the convenience of builds, then it 's on
| them to work from source. However, it's better IMO if a vendor
| or project start from that position rather than what's seen as
| a rug-pull.
|
| Of course, it's part of the playbook: when something is new and
| not widely adopted, the vendor goes to great effort to
| encourage adoption -- then the vendor starts looking at the
| paid vs. free usage and sees "huh, we have a 10000:1 ratio of
| paid to free users, including ten megacorps that show up
| grabbing binaries every 10 minutes for their CI/CD farm, and
| asking questions in our forums, but aren't paying a penny
| toward development and our investors are getting pissy."
| Jasp3r wrote:
| MinIO is not actually open source, their source code is just
| public.
|
| The company I work at spun up a MinIO instance, and we got
| hounded by MinIO lawyers claiming we had to pay because
| "hosting MinIO alters the source because of injecting
| configuration" and therefore violates their open source
| license.
|
| There have been multiple hacker news threads about this:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35328316
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32148007
| nunez wrote:
| You're correct, however:
|
| 1. The MinIO image on Docker Hub has more than a billion
| downloads [^0]. With those download counts, people have almost
| certainly written scripts that rely on this image existing
| (including their own Dockerfile! [^1]). Them leaving these
| images around is just asking for security breaches later down
| the line.
|
| 1b. While, yes, no-one's entitled to freely-available container
| images, it cost them almost nothing to maintain their existing
| toolchain for this. Them deciding to pull the plug is purely
| and entirely a money grab (and a dumb one, if you ask me; look
| at how the community responded with OpenTofu when Terraform
| when BUSL).
|
| 2. Fortunately, MinIO is a Golang app and can be built with a
| simple "go install" (though the build instructions in their
| docs don't align with the build recipe in their Makefile [^2]).
| However, they could pull a Tesla and make the source that they
| publish differ from the source that their binaries are built
| from.
|
| 3. They gave NO notice. That's the slimiest part of all of
| this. Tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters, and handfuls of
| enterprise products, run or package MinIO that are now using
| images that will no longer be updated. All of these people will
| need to completely change their toolchains to account for that,
| and soon. That's just not a kind thing to do.
|
| [^0] https://hub.docker.com/r/minio/minio/tags
|
| [^1] https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/Dockerfile
|
| [^2] https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/Makefile#L179
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| Years ago I worked in customer service. There was this guy who
| came in to to motivate us. He talked about the work of someone
| named Bob Farrell who had a chain of ice cream shops and sold
| burgers. He had received a letter from a disappointed customer.
| The customer had been given the extra pickles on his burgers
| for years and now one of Bob's employees told him he now had to
| pay extra for it. The customer said he'd never come back. Bob
| could have said "what an entitled idiot" and kept charging for
| pickles but he took that letter as a calling for how you should
| treat customers - just give 'em the pickle. It costs you next
| to nothing to give the customer the pickle and it makes them
| happy.
|
| Minio doesn't have to give non-paying users anything, but the
| story still applies. Give them the pickle. It costs nothing in
| the grand scheme of things, and if it does, ask for donations
| like any open source project would do to cover your costs. But
| as others have pointed out, Minio is not an open source
| company, they are a commercial company that has source
| available.
| hansmayer wrote:
| > Minio doesn't have to give non-paying users anything, but
| the story still applies.
|
| How on earth does it apply when your complete example story
| relies on the satisfaction of the paying customers. If you're
| not paying, you're not a customer - you're a user.
| crote wrote:
| > If you're not paying, you're not a customer - you're a
| user.
|
| This doesn't work with open-source projects: someone can
| still provide a lot of value to you _without_ explicitly
| paying for it. If a community member volunteers a lot of
| their time to contribute code or provide support to other
| users, then you _probably_ shouldn 't piss them off either.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| Users have value even when they're not paying.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Usually it's the short notice that gets peoples' hackles up.
| It's kind of a dirty trick. Everyone knows things can change.
| jinkylist wrote:
| While not notifying of the change earlier is annoying, I also
| don't see anywhere stated that they're obligated to provide
| services in addition to just providing me the source. Moreover
| the build-instructions don't seem complicated at all, anyone
| already extracting value from this should be capable of pulling
| the source and keep on running with it.
| some-ai-dev wrote:
| I wonder how many people only use Minio as a localdev S3
| alternative.
|
| At least that's all we use it for really
| stuaxo wrote:
| That's how I use it. It seems to also provide a lot of other
| stuff I don't use.
| luke5441 wrote:
| Every time I used it for more than that I ran into performance
| and other concerns (like durability and consistency) pretty
| quickly. I cannot imagine how this is used seriously when there
| is something like Ceph available.
|
| Turns out most file systems are horrible key-value stores.
| jinkylist wrote:
| >I cannot imagine how this is used seriously when there is
| something like Ceph available.
|
| Adopting Ceph is adopting a Ceph engineer, any use-case with
| the need and funding to run Ceph on production would easily
| be able to pay for commercial licenses and/or contribute
| majorly to this or their own fork. They work in different
| ball-parks entirely
| rglullis wrote:
| I have a 160TB minio cluster running for 4+ years who had dealt
| beautifully with node outages, one drive failure and the
| occassional hiccups on the datacenter.
|
| I was okay with not having support because I am not part of
| their customer base. I was okay with not having the webUI,
| though I wish they made an option where the webUI would be
| available for some basic-tier paid customers. But I can not be
| okay with this move. They are just giving the finger to all the
| community. They never tried to work out a solution that could
| let smaller users to contribute or support.
|
| I will seriously have to consider moving to Hetzner object
| storage.
| mlrtime wrote:
| What is the problem exactly you are facing now?
| rglullis wrote:
| Right now, my problem is that I can not update my minio
| cluster because I do not know of any trustworthy docker
| image that I can use, and the version I am on is exposed to
| (at least) one known CVE.
| rowanseymour wrote:
| Yeah CI tests and local dev environments for code that runs
| against S3 in prod. Right now sifting through the alternatives
| for whatever is easiest to run as a container in Github actions
| or docker-compose...
| grishka wrote:
| I use it to test my tiny written-from-scratch S3 client in my
| server app. But then I already have it installed, it already
| works, and I don't care about updates.
| imiric wrote:
| Shame. Textbook OSS rug pull. These people love to rely on OSS,
| and claim how committed they are to contribute to the ecosystem
| and to their community, but as soon as people are drawn to the
| project, start relying on it and using it in the same spirit of
| OSS that they enjoy themselves (which their chosen license
| allows, mind you), then it becomes a financial burden, priorities
| shift to their commercial offering, there's no "bandwidth" to
| maintain and support the "community" edition, and so on.
|
| STOP ABUSING OSS AS A MARKETING GIMMICK.
|
| Or perhaps an advice to people who might actually listen: stop
| being attracted to open source projects because of the word
| "open", and because you can use it gratis. There are plenty of
| good proprietary and commercial software whose authors treat
| their users with more respect than these leeches of good will and
| abusers of trust.
|
| I'm not against OSS being commercialized. In fact, I think that
| it's crucial for maintaining a healthy project in the long-
| term[1][2]. But this lingers on the developer having respect and
| equal regard for _all_ their users, regardless of how much they
| 're paying them. Yes, nobody working on software should be
| expected to work for free. But there is a philosophy behind this
| movement that goes beyond a financial transaction. It only works
| if everyone in the ecosystem is honest, and first and foremost
| has the intention of making the world a better place for
| _everyone_ , by not only depending on others who have this
| mindset, but by adopting it themselves. Claiming to be part of
| the OSS community, but being hostile to your OSS users is
| dishonest at best, and worthy of all criticism.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540307
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537750
| muragekibicho wrote:
| Isn't your diatribe contradictory. Your last paragraph appears
| to contradict your 'beliefs'.
| jinkylist wrote:
| >It only works if everyone in the ecosystem is honest
|
| In general, applying this to anything with the general public,
| I don't expect it to work. This is why we have laws, licenses
| and rules in the first place. You can preach all you want but
| it won't change humanity, you need something concrete,
| something written and agreed, like a license.
|
| Not all licenses protect the freedoms and rights you're used to
| in other licenses, and it needs to be taken into account when
| adopting any project. License terms that don't guarantee any
| sort of support or updates when you need them aren't in
| consideration at that point.
| imiric wrote:
| If you don't trust people, then OSS is not for you.
|
| You can't claim to provide software as a public good, while
| also gatekeeping it only for specific groups of people. If
| you want to do that, then choose a restrictive license, with
| the exact terms of use you're comfortable with, and don't
| work in the open to begin with. That is a valid strategy if
| your main priority is getting paid.
|
| My objection is towards people who use OSS licenses, but then
| take issue when others actually use the freedoms they've
| granted, and proceed to enshittify the project by removing
| features, putting them up behind a paywall, and in general
| being hostile and ignoring the user base they've gained in
| large part thanks to OSS. This is using OSS as a marketing
| tactic, which undermines the whole point of open source and
| the free software movement.
| tom1337 wrote:
| I am also so confused as to what MinIO is now. All I see on the
| website is AIStor - have they dropped the "S3 Alternative"
| Marketing and went full AI?
| antiloper wrote:
| If you want VC funding, your marketing pages need to go all-in
| on AI. Even if your product has nothing to do with it.
| timcobb wrote:
| Yikes
| aranw wrote:
| Recently adopted the Go MinIO SDK to abstract cloud-specific
| APIs. Really hoping the SDKs don't get a licensing change or
| yanked next
| arccy wrote:
| there's still gocloud.dev/blob ...
| adamcharnock wrote:
| We're working on a binary build process now. We hope to have
| something up at https://github.com/golithus soon.
|
| We use MinIO (community edition) a fair amount. And while we like
| it, it is also becoming increasingly clear that our days of
| deploying are numbered.
|
| We want to start experimenting with Garage for smaller
| deployments, and would be interesting to hear of any production
| experiences there. (Anyone done multi-PiB deployments?)
|
| Other than that we're going to start looking at Ceph/Rook for
| larger deployments.
| xavxav wrote:
| garage devs have told me of 10PiB+ deployments in production,
| but I've never operated one at that scale so I can't share much
| insight into the experience. Probably best to ask on their
| matrix chat.
| adamcharnock wrote:
| Done: https://github.com/golithus/minio-builds
| vietvu wrote:
| It's ok, just don't use them anymore if you don't like it. I will
| switch to something else.
| djdjsjejb wrote:
| this sucks because now im forced to make seaweedfs and ceph work
| haha
|
| seriously, minio sucks perf wise but they really did a good job
| making it easy to deploy with docker
| jraph wrote:
| The title of the HN submission might look a bit misleading. It's
| easy to misinterpret it and think MinIO stops being open source
| (which would be a bigger deal IMHO).
|
| I think this would be better: "MinIO stops distributing free
| Docker images"
|
| ---
|
| See also the relevant README section:
| https://github.com/minio/minio?tab=readme-ov-file#source-onl...
| 8-prime wrote:
| That was my interpretation of the title when I first clicked
| it. Still interesting but easy to misunderstand nevertheless.
| tomhow wrote:
| OK, we updated the title to your suggested one now.
| goku12 wrote:
| What was the previous title?
| jraph wrote:
| It was: MinIO (apparently) becomes source-only
|
| Thanks tomhow!
| munchlax wrote:
| For those left wondering what the original title was, it said
| minio went source-only.
|
| I don't see the problem in either case. For a Gentoo user, it
| changes nothing.
| ezascanbe wrote:
| Full disclosure: I work for Cloudian.
|
| While I understand the frustration with MinIO's approach here, I
| want to be upfront about what Cloudian HyperStore is and isn't -
| it is designed for multi-node, multi-site deployments (think 3+
| nodes minimum) and performs best on bare metal or dedicated
| infrastructure rather than containerized environments.
|
| It's a very mature S3 and offers IAM, SQS and STS endpoints as
| well.
|
| If you're running MinIO at scale in production and looking at
| migration options, I'm happy to connect you with our team who can
| discuss whether HyperStore makes sense for your use case. That
| said, for single-node dev environments or lightweight deployments
| that many here are using MinIO for, the community alternatives
| mentioned in this thread are probably better fits. Different
| tools for different scales. Happy to answer any technical
| questions about HyperStore's architecture if helpful.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| What is Cloudian? You guys didn't develop Minio did you?
| (Google says Minio Inc?) If you did it's hard to tell.
| ezascanbe wrote:
| No, Cloudian did not develop MinIO - completely separate
| companies. MinIO was developed by MinIO Inc. Cloudian makes
| HyperStore, which is our own S3-compatible object storage
| solution. We're a competitor to MinIO, not affiliated with
| them in any way.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Ah I see. Will check yours out.
| blitzar wrote:
| #ad
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| https://github.com/coollabsio/minio
|
| I was reading the github discussion and found out that coollabs
| has taken on the decision to make docker images for these.
|
| https://github.com/coollabsio/minio
|
| https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/21647#issuecomment-342...
|
| >Until we (the community) figure out something, I made an
| automated docker image version here:
| https://github.com/coollabsio/minio
|
| The latest release is already available on ghcr and on dockerhub
| for amd and arm.
|
| Well they have locked the discussion right now it seems but hope
| the community does something since my brother once asked for how
| to store audio and I thought that something like S3 could be
| perfect for it and wanted him to use minio or check it out.
|
| Idk what I will recommend now? Garage? Seaweedfs?
| mlrtime wrote:
| Wow, ~75 lines of Dockerfile and ~300 lines of github actions,
| hosted on a FREE platform.
|
| Seriously, what is the rage here, anyone could do this.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Anyone including MinIO. So why did they stop doing it when it
| was so easy?
|
| Especially because they haven't provided any reasoning for
| this decision, so everyone assumes the worst. I can't really
| think of any reason for this that puts them in a positive
| light either, can you?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I hope you have read the github issue page
|
| This was the first person after so so many comments to
| actually do something about it, and he's from coolify which
| can be decently trusted with.
|
| Everybody likes to rant and the dislikes on github issues
| show but I just respect the guy for even taking his time to
| write this.
|
| Sure you can try to reduce it to LOC or anyone can do this,
| but did you?
|
| Also there is a trust factor, I can trust coolify's docker
| image as compared to any other people.
| woopwoop24 wrote:
| garage and for the minio gateway (RIP) i use versitygw
| toddnni wrote:
| Have been looking for minio alternative for long already. Found
| versitygw lately and would like to share the joy. It feels very
| promising. Fits to many small or lab use cases.
|
| It does not actually solve the trickiness of managing large
| storage but relies on the backend (that is usually fs like zfs
| in small setups).
|
| However, seems to be quite new project plus the risk, that the
| owning company takes it to bad direction, is there too.
|
| https://github.com/versity/versitygw/
| computersuck wrote:
| Just make a fork and release built images via github actions with
| ghcr. Then ask people to switch to it.
|
| The great thing about open src is the ability to walk away.
| removed features in new release? fork and put it back. quit
| complaining and be the change the world needs you to be
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| https://github.com/coollabsio/minio
|
| Can't emphasize on it enough but I trust the coolify team
| enough. Lets all jump to this ig
|
| There are people who are being the change they want to see,
| thanks coolify team.
| Raed667 wrote:
| back in the day, I had an automated Github action that would
| pull and build a polyfill.io image every time there was a
| tagged release
|
| You don't even need to fork the project, you can just extend /
| distribute
| antonyh wrote:
| I don't see the problem here in theory - if I want to trust
| something fully I'll build it myself in my own pipeline, often
| with additional hardening as needed. It only needs scripting out
| the build process to fit alongside my other code. I even do this
| for Linux apps like Signal because I want a clean binary that
| matches the Git tag, packaged exactly right for my system, built
| with the libraries already in place locally.
|
| What's not cool is not pushing a fresh Docker image to secure the
| CVE, leaving anyone using Docker hanging. Regardless of the new
| policy, they should have followed through and made the fix public
| on all distribution channels. Leaving a known unsafe version as
| the last release is irresponsible.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > Leaving a known unsafe version as the last release is
| irresponsible.
|
| I think they should have done a better job of announcing this
| ahead of time (or at all, really); but there's realistically
| never going to be a CVE-free release to stop on, because the
| next CVE is just around the corner.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| I'm not sure why I got downvoted here. Minio's behavior here
| is shitty - but in a day or a month after the last image is
| released, there /will/ be a CVE that affects that image. By
| GPs statement, when are they then able to stop releasing?
| mattbee wrote:
| They abandoned documentation (edit: for the open source codebase)
| a couple of weeks ago - that seems more significant.
|
| From their Slack on Oct 10:
|
| "The documentation sites at docs.min.io/community have been
| pulled of this morning and will redirect to the equivalent AIStor
| documentation _where possible_ ". [emphasis mine]
|
| The minio/docs repository hasn't been updated in 2 weeks now, and
| the implication is that isn't going to be.
|
| Even when I set up a minio cluster this February, it was both
| impressively easy and hard in a few small aspects. The most
| crucial installation tips - around 100Gb networking, Linux kernel
| tunables and fault-finding - were hung off comments on their
| github, talking about files that were deleted from the repository
| years ago.
|
| I've built a cluster for a client that's being expanded to
| [?]100PB this year. The price of support comes in at at slightly
| less than the equivalent amount of S3 storage (not including the
| actual hosting costs!). The value of it just isn't that high to
| my client - so I guess we're just coasting on what we can get
| now, and will have to see what real community might form around
| the source.
|
| I'm not a free software die-hard so I'm grateful for the work
| minio have put into the world, and the business it's enabling.
| But it seems super-clear they're stopping those contributions,
| and I'd bet the final open source release will happen in the next
| year.
|
| If anyone else is hosting with minio & can't afford the support
| either :) please drop me a line and maybe we can get something
| going.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Nah, it's _fine_. It 's Open Source, you can document it
| yourself if you need to! But there is no obligation from the
| MinIO authors to provide it, you're not entitled to it.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| It sounds like you're being sarcastic but what you say is
| correct and true.
| danudey wrote:
| It can be correct and true while at the same time being
| bad-faith and user-hostile.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| That does sound much worse than hiding the pre-built images
| from users. I hope that documentation is archived. There's
| probably some benefit in documenting those installation tips
| elsewhere besides Github comments.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| I'm sure it's been scraped to be regurgitated by a whole slew
| of LLMs.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| old documentation doesn't help when the software changes
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Yeah, running binaries of varying qualities taken from all
| sorts of places is a bad idea anyways. Distro packages are
| generally more consistent or even running "go build" yourself
| is probably better in this case.
|
| But pulling existing documentation is a whole different
| matter. One can argue that they don't have an obligation to
| maintain the docs, though it would effectively make continued
| use of newer versions untenable. But pulling existing ones is
| an unnecessary rug pull when it doesn't cost anything to keep
| it online. It's a big middle finger to open source.
| jamespo wrote:
| With 100PB clusters being built and not a cent going to them,
| you can see why minio has gone this route. I wonder if they
| will be "valkeyed"? Not by AWS presumably.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| > I wonder if they will be "valkeyed"? Not by AWS presumably
|
| Almost certainly not, due to the AGPL license. I know Nutanix
| got into hot water about distributing Minio so I don't think
| any big shop will fork it.
| asmor wrote:
| Nuantrix distributed a version that was still Apache
| licensed and merely failed to disclose they had made
| changes.
|
| This is after MinIO asserted that Weka had also stolen
| their AGPL-licensed code, showing that they extracted
| binaries from the distribution. They forgot that that
| 3-month old (unmodified) version was still Apache licensed
| though.
|
| MinIO generally don't seem to consult lawyers often. They
| haven't even set up copyright assignment / CLA immediately
| after switching the license, so technically they are also
| incapable of selling AGPL license exceptions just like
| everyone else.
|
| I've done my best to keep MinIO away from most infra I
| manage, not because of legal concerns but because it was
| kind of obvious they'd eventually go full scorched earth
| and either drop images or the source code distribution all
| together. Maybe now we can all move on to a fork, or
| SeaweedFS, or Ceph, or literally anything else.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| > showing that they extracted binaries from the
| distribution
|
| Funnily enough, such action is outside of their paid
| product's EULA.
| msarrel wrote:
| They don't consult lawyers. The CEO husband and wife team
| get really angry and fire off threatening letters, but
| I've never seen them consult a lawyer before sending a
| letter like that or accusing a company of violating a
| license publicly.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| It's the sort of behaviour that makes them relying on
| them even as a paying customer extremely risky.
| thayne wrote:
| That just means the fork would also need to be AGPL
| licensed, and the owner of the fork wouldn't be able to
| also sell a proprietary version with additional
| "enterprise" features. And IMO that would be a good thing.
|
| I think it is unlikely a single entity would do that. But a
| coalition of current MinIO users might get together to
| create such a project, perhaps under the Auspices of a
| foundation such as the Linux Foundation. Although, I think
| that scenario would be more similar to OpenTofu than
| Valkey.
| nilamo wrote:
| That's a strange mindset, IMO. I'd be pissed if I had to pay
| $0.10 every time I turned a rachet, and it's weird to expect
| companies to have usage-based monetization on the tools
| they've made for others.
| jamespo wrote:
| Let me introduce you to Splunk and enterprise software in
| general
| serf wrote:
| did you buy the ratchet?
|
| that's why you'd be pissed.
| protonbob wrote:
| If you were given the ratchet and then someone wanted to
| charge you every time you use it you would also be
| pissed.
| palmotea wrote:
| > If you were given the ratchet and then someone wanted
| to charge you every time you use it you would also be
| pissed.
|
| People gotta eat. If someone's making valuable tools and
| giving them away, they still need to get paid somehow. If
| people aren't voluntarily tipping them enough, then
| something's gotta give.
|
| There have been too many stories of open source
| developers basically burning themselves out for years,
| then it comes out that they're barely scraping by and
| can't take it anymore.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| > People gotta eat. If someone's making valuable tools
| and giving them away, they still need to get paid
| somehow. If people aren't voluntarily tipping them
| enough, then something's gotta give.
|
| No one is saying people can't charge for their work
| though.
| danudey wrote:
| The problem then is that you're making a valuable tool
| and giving it away and then wandering around hat in hand.
| That's not going to work for anyone. Also, taking away
| things that you've already given people for free so that
| they have to pay you to get them back is not going to
| engender any goodwill.
|
| Unfortunately, the minio devs seem to have fallen into
| the common trap: make a great OSS project that works and
| that everyone likes, give it away for free, not know how
| to make money from it, and then start making user-hostile
| moves that piss off your users to try to make them
| customers - and who, surprisingly, do not want to be
| customers now that you've pissed them off.
|
| It starts to feel more like a protection racket. You've
| got some great features here, would be a shame if
| something happened to them. Oh no, your docker
| containers! Oh, that's a tragedy what happened there, but
| you know, accidents happen.
| palmotea wrote:
| > The problem then is that you're making a valuable tool
| and giving it away and then wandering around hat in hand.
| That's not going to work for anyone.
|
| That is textbook open source idealism: you give to the
| community, the community gives back. The problem is a lot
| of people are moochers, even very rich people who have
| money coming out of their ears.
|
| > It starts to feel more like a protection racket. You've
| got some great features here, would be a shame if
| something happened to them. Oh no, your docker
| containers! Oh, that's a tragedy what happened there, but
| you know, accidents happen.
|
| Come on, don't be so uncharitable. It's nothing like a
| protection racket, which is pure, planned exploitation.
| This is open source idealism coming into contact with
| capitalist reality.
| naikrovek wrote:
| if people are giving away wrenches and not getting paid
| for that, they will quickly run out of wrenches, and they
| will learn. giving away something free does not
| inherently give them the right to charge for use of the
| wrench.
|
| giving a wrench to someone where you charge based on
| usage should be something that is agreed upon up front,
| not at some point later, after a rug is pulled out from
| under the customer.
| palmotea wrote:
| > giving a wrench to someone where you charge based on
| usage should be something that is agreed upon up front,
| not at some point later, after a rug is pulled out from
| under the customer.
|
| You're mixing up non-capitalist kindness and reciprocity
| relations with market relations. They're different
| things. Downloading open source code doesn't make you
| anyone's "customer."
|
| The thing that happens _first_ with these "open-source
| gone closed stories" is the community (or one
| particularly big mooch) failed to reciprocate the
| developer's efforts or was otherwise undercutting them.
| _Then_ the developer responded.
|
| And of course, the predictable response from some parts
| of the community is " _how dare you_ not let me mooch off
| your efforts _forever_. I am entitled!1! Protection
| racket! Rug pull! "
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Conflating physical products and open source software
| doesn't usually make sense. The open source model is more
| like someone making a valuable tool for their own use and
| then agreeing to let other people copy the design and
| make their own version of it. Monetisation can come from
| various sources - you may be paid to make the tool in the
| first place or you may perform a job where that tool
| helps you (or whoever is paying you).
| saltcured wrote:
| I know this is anathema around here, but this is why I
| have always liked grant-funded open source work. Whether
| government or private, someone at a policy level decides
| that something is important, and pays for development,
| leading to a new public good.
|
| The development cost is based on the complexity of the
| work. It doesn't require a royalty payment in order to
| deploy more copies or to run them at higher loads. The
| software already exists. Separately, normal economic
| decisions can be made around support of deployments, e.g.
| whether to use in-house labor, hire consultants, or
| subscribe to some service contract. Sometimes, but not
| always, the users are another grant-funded project.
|
| This model isn't a lottery ticket for the developers, nor
| the capital class. But the developers get paid a good
| wage for the time they spend on a product. I've done it
| for the majority of the last 30 years, almost like being
| a conscientious objector to the VC marketing complex.
|
| Unfortunately, there are societal forces working hard
| against open source public goods. I think regulatory-
| capture is turning the whole security space into a
| compliance moat for heavily capitalized players. And the
| higher education cost spiral keeps increasing the
| overhead for universities, where a lot of these open
| source developer jobs used to be found. These are
| overlapping, but I'd say not the same thing. The overhead
| in academia is more than just compliance burden.
|
| And, the whole fad-chasing and hustle aspect of
| contemporary IT is an inflationary process, eroding the
| value of previously developed open source products. Over
| my career, it seems that production-ready code is getting
| an ever-shorter service life. More maintenance and
| redevelopment work is needed or else users abandon it for
| the Next Big Thing. It's been quite a ride for me,
| following the whole wave of GNU, MIT, BSD, Linux, Python,
| and scientific computing tools since the early 90s...
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| No I wouldn't, I would say "yeah that makes sense doesn't
| it"
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| In this example the ratchet manufacturer would be giving
| them away for free though, and then get pissed when no
| one volunteers to pay.
| bee_rider wrote:
| An analogy to making a physical tool doesn't really work
| because we have to basically describe what software is in
| terms of exceptions to the analogy.
|
| If I had a ratchet that, every time I turned it, I had to
| pay $.1, but I'd gotten it for free, but it was basically
| free to replicate, but the person who designed it did have
| to spend some significant work on R&D for the thing... I
| have no idea how I'd price that or how I'd feel.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| oh you really butchered that metaphor.
|
| The ratchet isn't what's getting paid in the metaphor,
| it's the person turning it.
|
| There's always a time-sink cost to a public project.
|
| Anyway, there's definitely a public good argument to turn
| certain software projects into utilities.
| toast0 wrote:
| That's the open source model. It's entirely predictable that
| if you provide software at no cost that is capable of running
| 100PB clusters, that some people will and you won't get paid,
| because those are the terms that you set.
|
| It's fine to change your mind, but doing it in this way
| doesn't build goodwill. It would be better if they made an
| announcement that they would stop creating/distributing
| images on some future date; I'm sure that would also be
| poorly received, but it would show organizational capacity
| for continuity.
|
| If I'm considering paying them for support, especially at the
| prices quoted elsewhere in the thread, I need to know they
| won't drop support for my wacky system on a whim. (If my
| system wasn't wacky, I probably wouldn't need paid support)
| danudey wrote:
| There are a few challenges with open-source projects that
| want to also be commercial entities.
|
| One is obviously knowing what you can add-on that people
| will pay for; support, for one, but people want more
| features too. What could minio have built on top of their
| product to sell to people? Presumably some kind of S3-style
| tiered storage system, replication, a good UI, whatever
| else, I'm not sure.
|
| The second is getting people to actually know that that's
| an issue. I work for Tigera which publishes the Calico CNI
| for Kubernetes, and one of the biggest issues we have is
| that people set up Calico on their clusters, configure it,
| and then just never think about it again. A testament to
| the quality of the product, I'm sure, but it makes it
| difficult to get people to even know we have a commercial
| offering, let alone what it is and does and why it might be
| beneficial.
|
| I could see the same thing for Minio; even if they have a
| great OSS product, a great commercial offering on top of
| that, and great support, getting people to even be aware of
| it in the first place is going to be a huge challenge and
| getting people to pay for it is even harder.
|
| It's sad that they went the completely wrong direction and
| started taking things away from the community to force
| people to the commercial side of things whether they're
| willing to pay or not.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| If they charged a cent, would people adopt it in the first
| place?
|
| They still got paid for those free users. Via investments.
| Cash is cash. I don't KNOW what the RIGHT business model is,
| I don't run MinIO, and neither do you.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Wait until you find out how much compute is being run on
| Linux without a cent going to Linus.
| Kevinmetaba wrote:
| During an upgrade, I discovered that the console had been
| removed without any prior notice. MinIO really pissed me off.
| Over a month ago, I started looking for a MinIO alternative and
| found RustFS. I've been testing RustFS for over a month now,
| and the product continues to improve, with the community fixing
| bugs very quickly. I hope YC will invest in this company.
| nunez wrote:
| At the same time, I'm concerned that a YC investment means
| more of the same, eventually: open-source until it's no
| longer fiscally prudent.
| Kevinmetaba wrote:
| Is open source and making money in conflict? If they do a
| good job, I am willing to pay.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Not necessarily, but if there's a cost to providing free
| support to the community like official container images,
| then it will get cut. People comment that it's "free" to
| provide these things through Github, but it actually has
| a cost to the maintainers in time, and it's frankly an
| easy business decision to stop doing that at times in
| favor of roadmap work that produces business value.
|
| What I'm learning from this is to provide basically zero
| support from the outset and let it grow organically if I
| ever build a business on an open source product. As soon
| as you stop supporting anything for free someone feels
| entitled to it.
| tankenmate wrote:
| "but if there's a cost to providing free support to the
| community like official container images, then it will
| get cut.", but here's the kicker, supporting creating
| docker images when you're on github is close to
| negligible as to be paper thin.
| baq wrote:
| free software until mainstream acceptance. naive MBAs call
| it leaving money on the table, Microsoft calls it a
| monopoly-preserving strategy. no VC has the balls to go for
| the jugular anymore.
| williamstein wrote:
| There is a nice table here
|
| https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs?tab=readme-ov-
| file#rustfs-v...
|
| comparing RustFS to MinIO, including a claim about the MinIo
| support price.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| The benchmark against MinIO is nice, but I don't care much
| for the table vs. "Other object storage" which seems to try
| to aggregate all the worst points of all the others with no
| citation (e.g. why should I believe RustFS has no
| intellectual property risk but others do? What's different
| about them to back that up?).
| smartbit wrote:
| Here an S3 compatibility table
| https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/reference-
| manua... comparing - GarageFS -
| OpenStack Swift - CEPH Object Gateway Rados -
| Riak CS - OpenIO
| Nux wrote:
| Nothing like VC or IPO to ruin a perfectly good product...
| naikrovek wrote:
| it used to be that people started businesses so that they
| could help others by providing a product or a service to
| them.
|
| late stage capitalism arrives when people create businesses
| solely to get rich, and when other companies are created
| solely to get rich by helping those people create their
| companies so that they can get rich. that's what
| ycombinator is.
|
| most of capitalism used to be symbiotic. engaging in
| transactions with businesses benefited both the business
| and the consumer.
|
| now we live in a world where most or all of the benefit
| goes to the business and none or almost none to the
| consumer.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| If they were giving it away for free and paying a non-
| zero cost to do it, that's not sustainable. And that
| clearly isn't taking all the benefit for themselves. This
| is a take so bad, it isn't a take anymore...its a
| personality flaw.
| crote wrote:
| Literally nobody is making that claim. _Nobody_ expects
| businesses to be charities.
|
| The thing being argued against is businesses _solely_
| being viewed as a "get rich quick" gambling scheme,
| where the only thing that matters is a rapid rise in
| shareholder value. VCs don't want a company providing a
| steady retirement fund, they want you to go for a 1000x
| return or die trying. The logical end result is that you
| screw over your customers and employees whenever
| possible, and burn the entire thing to the ground for the
| last few bucks. Just look at what Broadcom is doing to
| VMware: they might've delivered some great shareholder
| value, but they did _huge_ damage to society in the
| process!
|
| We shouldn't allow businesses to operate like a cancer
| which grows forever until it eventually kills its host,
| leeching off as much in the process as possible. If you
| want sustainability, you should be clamoring for
| businesses which are happy to just _operate_ : employ
| some people, provide a valuable service to society, and
| make some profit - no need to take over the world in a
| crazy frenzy chasing unlimited growth.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Thank you.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Your understanding of what I said is the bad take, here.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think very few businesses were created just to help
| people. Maybe some nonprofits.
|
| Lots of good businesses were created to just make their
| owners a reasonable income, I mean, most people will take
| "be rich" if that's an option but have reasonable
| expectations.
|
| The problem with heavily invested in companies is occurs
| when they skip the stage of being a small profitable
| business with an actual business model.
| naikrovek wrote:
| I think even 50 years ago, that most people started
| businesses because they had a skill and could use it to
| help others meet their needs.
|
| HP started (more than 50 years ago) with two friends who
| wanted to make better electronic test equipment. Profit
| was not forefront in their mind like it is to an MBA
| graduate today. Hewlett and Packard wanted to provide
| quality test equipment to people, because a lot of the
| test equipment of the day was subpar to them.
|
| By the time the 80s rolled around, they paid 100% of an
| employee's college education (no matter how high they
| wanted to go with that) and paid them 75% of their salary
| while they were away at school. College was cheaper then,
| but zero employers today would even briefly consider
| paying people any amount at all to _not_ be at work while
| also paying for the thing keeping them away from work.
|
| corner stores in crowded neighborhoods are not started to
| maximize profit potential for shareholders. corner stores
| are started because someone saw the need for a corner
| store and wanted to make a living running it; they wanted
| that to be their job.
|
| Until the invention of the MBA I don't think most people
| who started businesses did so purely for money. There are
| many easier ways to make money. Today people can start
| shitting mobile games with pay to win mechanics and they
| will be rich when the first one takes off. No one creates
| mobile games with pay to win mechanics because they want
| people to experience the joy of microtransactions.
|
| Every business today (certainly every _tech_ business) is
| designed to find out what people want via market
| research, pick the thing that looks the most profitable,
| then through a very well developed process, turn that
| business into a source of retirement money for the
| founder(s) and a source of return for the investors. It
| is literally a photocopy model of business creation.
| "Follow the process and you will succeed."
|
| No one is opening shops today to help their neighbor. No
| one is opening new bakeries because their town needs one.
| No one is doing anything that one used to see people
| doing everywhere they went. Profit-driven motivation
| ruins everything it touches. Everything.
|
| Everything is profit driven, now. Everything. The MBA is
| the most disasterous degree ever devised. It makes people
| think that starting a business purely to make money is a
| perfectly normal and healthy thing to do, and it simply
| isn't.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That's a bit naive. Look at the early industrial
| revolution, when most goods were still made at home,
| locally or on a small scale by craftsmen.
|
| People went from having the land and resources to craft,
| for example, their own shoes, then a few decades later
| they were in a position where they had to buy shitty
| factory made shoes that fell apart instead because they
| were kicked off their land to work in factories.
| tw04 wrote:
| >The price of support comes in at at slightly less than the
| equivalent amount of S3 storage
|
| That's absurd. I would be running to NetApp and Dell for
| competitive object storage quotes then. Haven't done pricing on
| either one recently but at least a few years ago they were
| roughly half the price of S3 all in (including hosting costs).
| votepaunchy wrote:
| > half the price of S3
|
| No one other than hobbyists is paying full price on AWS.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| How to not pay full price on AWS? We pay $10K+ per month
| and nobody gives us any discount.
| BozeWolf wrote:
| To be fair, for aws that is hobbyist numbers. We (400
| people data company) pay 10 times that amount. Let alone
| big enterprises.
|
| We do get discount, but it wont make it cheap.
| bargle0 wrote:
| What kind of hobby do you have where you're spending
| $10k/month?
| m00x wrote:
| I see you've never heard of Warhammer 40k
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| I see you haven't heard of SLA printers
| lobsterthief wrote:
| There's a lot of middleground between hobbyists and your
| company's use ;) Most mid-sized publishers I've worked
| with are in the $4-10k/mo range depending on CDN
| availability
| BozeWolf wrote:
| Of course, I agree.
|
| My point is that the parent I was replying to replied to
| "only hobbyists pay full price on aws". The parent was
| expecting to get a discount on a 10k monthly bill. It is
| a lot of money, but not to AWS. You probably wont get
| (much) discount on 10k a month.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Holy shit, it's brutal. What do you sell and how many
| customers do you have?
| skywhopper wrote:
| The good discounts start around 100x your spend.
| ghshephard wrote:
| If you are comfortable with making a commit 1-3 year
| commit - you can get 27-50% discounts at pretty much any
| spend I think.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/compute-pricing/
| throwaway-aws9 wrote:
| Right, but depending on your workload, compute might just
| be 1/3 to 1/2 of your spend. The remainder going on
| storage, networking (egress and internal between regions
| & AZs), LBs, and higher abstraction services (from queues
| to search to serverless).
|
| Feels great to talk about 27-50% but turns out it's
| 9%-16% when all is said and done. You can get commitment
| savings on other services but you need higher spend.
|
| Feels odd that big cloud gives better discounts to
| enterprise. They really don't cater to startups as much
| as they posture.
| antonkochubey wrote:
| Savings plans and reserved instances will get you at
| least 50% off EC2, RDS, and some other things
| mannyv wrote:
| You talk to your account rep to do a guaranteed spend in
| exchange for a discount.
|
| Some services get large discounts, some don't. Depends on
| utilization. For 10k you should get a lot.
| jerf wrote:
| Maybe someone else somewhere is getting some unbelievably
| sweet deal but what I've seen from cloud discounting is
| more in the "single digit percentage" range than "2/3rds
| off" or something.
| ghshephard wrote:
| There are a ton of different discount options - large
| customers typically get between 50-60% discount based on
| committed spending, and AWS is pretty flexible around how
| that commit lands (they will allow roll overs even if
| they say they won't). Reserved instances get you ~70%
| discounts - similar to the committed spending. And my
| favorite - if it works for you - spot instances on EC2
| come at as high as 90% off.
|
| Nobody at commercial volume pays list to AWS - everyone
| gets a discount.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Everywhere I've worked discounts have been 40-60%. If
| you're getting leas than 40% whoever manages your cloud
| account isn't doing one of their job duties.
| crest wrote:
| Even 1/3 of the AWS egress list price is a rip-off.
| tw04 wrote:
| I guess it's a good thing I'm not talking about list price.
| Do you really think when you're doing a cost comparison of
| AWS S3 to NetApp or Dell object storage a fortune 500 says:
| go ahead and use list pricing for the comparison? We plug
| in their existing discount structure... because otherwise
| it would be a rather pointless exercise for everyone
| involved.
| outofpaper wrote:
| Agreed and for most smaller use cases theres always b2 from
| Backblaze.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| That, in itself, should be plenty of reason to stay the
| hell away from it.
| eek2121 wrote:
| Cloudflare is the cheapest, from what I understand, due to
| free egress and competitive pricing:
| https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/r2/
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Well, gosh. Maybe I'm glad I didn't get that documentation job
| with MinIO after all.
| clan wrote:
| Reasonable.
|
| That seems to be the key word.
|
| One camp argues: Expect nothing. Move on.
|
| The other: Could they - with very little effort (reasonable) -
| have choosen a more palatable route.
|
| There must be a middle ground between the nihilists and the
| pampered.
| adamcharnock wrote:
| We [0] use MinIO with for our clients so we've just thrown
| together a nightly build process. Use/fork as you wish:
|
| https://github.com/golithus/minio-builds
|
| Example use: docker run -p 9000:9000 -p
| 9001:9001 ghcr.io/golithus/minio:latest
|
| [0]: https://lithus.eu
| xrd wrote:
| If anyone is wondering, the Dockerfile for this repo (thanks
| for sharing!) basically just copies the binary in, it is a 19
| line dockerfile.
|
| I see both sides of the argument here, the people maintaining
| minio should not have to push docker images for free, it is
| work to maintain and test, especially across all the host
| platforms. And, this work isn't that complicated if you want to
| do it yourself.
|
| https://github.com/golithus/minio-builds/blob/main/Dockerfil...
| adamcharnock wrote:
| No problem!
|
| And it is very true. Although the binary does also need
| building, which is also handled in the above actions
| workflow.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >I see both sides of the argument here, the people
| maintaining minio should not have to push docker images for
| free, it is work to maintain and test, especially across all
| the host platforms. And, this work isn't that complicated if
| you want to do it yourself
|
| I don't. It's automated, it needs approximately zero
| attention. This is just a company that got where it was
| benefitting from open source taking the free toys away
| thinking there'll be profit in it.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Curious how you handle legal reviews by your customers'
| shipping AGPL licensed software? We've had a lot of pushback
| from legal even on licenses like MPL
| asgeirn wrote:
| Getting it from source is as easy as `go install
| github.com/minio/minio@latest` if you have a recent Go.
|
| In addition your favorite Linux distribution probably has it as
| from-source builds already.
|
| For a container image you could try making one from Alpine or
| Wolfi.
| kaoussi wrote:
| I built my own S3-less Minio alternative few weeks ago, should I
| open source it?
|
| It's built using Rust and React Router.
|
| Just playing around with it
| antiloper wrote:
| Just run `docker build` yourself. Why does this non-issue spawn
| dozens of comments? This isn't some impossible-to-build Windows
| C++ project.
| reustle wrote:
| Render also pushes MinIO as their recommended equivalent to S3
| for their customers (using docker), similar to Bucketeer on
| Heroku.
|
| https://render.com/docs/deploy-minio
|
| Hopefully this will finally push Render to build their own S3
| wrapper.
| anurag wrote:
| (Render CEO) We're prioritizing Object Storage independent of
| this move.
| yodon wrote:
| What did MinIO say to Wordpress? "hold my beer"
| tzahifadida wrote:
| This reminds me about the bitnami containers. They pulled the
| docker images so everyone migrated away because they fear they
| will also pull the artifacts building the project. They never
| said that. They seem to be continuing to updating the projects
| and providing access to the artifacts. It is very easy to build
| the dockers... it is just a dockerfile really... There is really
| no upside to stop updating the projects, it is free marketing...
| spicyusername wrote:
| Lots of people in this thread keep repeating the idea that,
| "Nobody owes anybody anything".
|
| Sure, just like nobody owes minio goodwill or business. People
| sour on these kinds of things because they feel sneaky and
| backhanded. It tells you something about the kind of people
| you're working with.
|
| Imagine if a food kitchen suddenly started charging for the food,
| without notice. Or they started charging to use changing rooms in
| clothing stores. Etc, etc. You'd, rightly, expect a negative
| reaction, even if the "food kitchen doesn't owe anybody
| anything".
|
| The biggest misstep in these situations is the corporations
| avoiding being honest and communicative about why the changes are
| suddenly necessary. We all know, intuitively, that in most cases
| its because it's not for a good reason. It's because they are
| greedy or otherwise feel pressured to show infinite growth.
| gethly wrote:
| I think Minio is the only Go client for S3 API and S3-compatible
| APIs. I cannot say I liked using it, but I had no choice.
| Nowadays I run my own file storage with my own API, so I no
| longer care.
|
| But if anyone wants to run their own file storage(so not a
| client), there is https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs
| nthdesign wrote:
| I've used the minio-go client library for about a year now. I
| don't see anything in the minio-go README or elsewhere to make
| me think it will no longer be supported. In fact, the most
| recently merged PR was yesterday. There are some other Go S3
| clients, like https://github.com/kelindar/s3, but I don't know
| if any other Go S3 clients have the complete set of features
| that minio-go has.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Surely there's github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2 ?
| cduzz wrote:
| I haven't used minio in years, and when I did I only fiddled
| around with it, but my recollection of it is that it's about the
| simplest build chain imaginable. Install modern golang, build
| minio, get single binary.
|
| Anyone _relying_ on an opensource tool like minio, needs to look
| at: * organization supporting it * the
| license * the build chain * who else uses it? *
| the distribution artifact needed for production.
|
| Once you've looked at that you can decide "is this an anchor I
| want to handcuff myself to and hope the anchor won't jump into
| the icy blue deep taking me and my dreams with it?"
|
| If the org behind it ever decides to rugpull/elastic you, what're
| you gonna do? At least with something like minio, if they're
| still distributing the source it's trivial to build (and if you
| can't build it you should evaluate if you're in a position to
| rely on it).
|
| Let's look at other cool open source things like SigNoz which
| distribute _only_ docker artifacts (as far as I remember, anyhow)
| -- if they were to rugpull that people relying on it would be
| totally lost at sea.
|
| This isn't to say that this isn't poor behavior on minio's part,
| but I feel like they've been signaling us for a while that
| they're looking to repay their VC patrons.
| apavlo wrote:
| > If the org behind it ever decides to rugpull/elastic you
|
| I love it that you use "elastic" as a verb here.
| goku12 wrote:
| They have also removed the web UI and stopped updating the
| documentation for the community edition. The former is not
| extremely serious as the community can easily replace it. The
| latter is arguably the worst among all the changes that we know
| of. While they do redirect community documentation towards its
| enterprise counterpart, it's becoming clear that the
| differences in the community edition won't be addressed at all.
| That will make MinIO community edition less viable over time.
|
| Overall, it's pretty clear that they don't view the OSS users
| kindly or want them around. I'm pretty sure that they would
| drop the entire community edition if they could do so legally
| and without much fuzz. You can expect more like this in the
| future. So this story shouldn't be seen simply as the loss of a
| docker image.
| cduzz wrote:
| Right -- I think it's quite clear that if you're relying on
| the free minio you need to look elsewhere or peer up with
| some others and fork it.
|
| And any adoption of a critical piece of software needs to
| have a risk calculus associated with it of "what if they get
| bought by CA, invaded by Russia and murdered, murder their
| wife and go to jail, or dedicate their remaining time on
| earth to writing haiku?"
|
| Both open source software and commercially supported software
| have risks and mitigations. I'd argue that you're actually
| safer with open source software since you can pick up and
| keep running it, but that's not a trivial undertaking.
| goku12 wrote:
| > I'd argue that you're actually safer with open source
| software since you can pick up and keep running it, but
| that's not a trivial undertaking.
|
| I agree with that. It's just that I find it very annoying
| that these companies turn against the OSS (user) community
| after they've gained enough market share by taking
| advantage of the community's trust and network. This
| discussion thread itself is full of people calling the
| users 'entitled'. That's some level of gaslighting! The
| real question is, how much would these projects have
| succeeded if they had started under the same terms as the
| ones they've now switched to? If the answer is 'not very
| much', then that means the community added significant
| value to the product, which these companies are now
| refusing to share and running away with. These companies
| are the entitled ones, besides being deceptive and
| dishonest.
|
| The case with MinIO is not as egregious as the others we
| have seen - elastic, for example. MinIO is still under an
| open source license. But their decisions to let the
| community edition documentation rot and to remove the web
| ui make it very clear that they're trying to make the
| community edition as unviable as possible without having to
| take the heat for going all out proprietary or source
| available. Does this tactic seem familiar? This exactly
| what Google does with AOSP. Slowly remove and replace its
| OSS parts with proprietary software and gradually kill the
| project. Again, it's deceptive, dishonest and distasteful.
|
| Both free software and open source software have a
| tradition of not excluding anybody from participating in
| the process, community and contributions. But looking at
| how much certain companies damage the trust and fracture
| the community for some extra profit, it might be a good
| idea to start asking if they should even be given the
| opportunity to do so.
| Zopieux wrote:
| Just use Garage. https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| Just build your damn image if you need it.
|
| They don't owe you anything.
| serf wrote:
| minio is guilty of a lot worse sins than pulling a docker image
| -- hate them for those, not because it's more inconvenient to
| run.
| akagusu wrote:
| Item 15 of the license states: THE COPYRIGHT
| HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM *"AS IS"*
| WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND
|
| They have no obligations to provide documentation, binaries or
| anything beyond the source code.
|
| I personally think this is a better option than migrating from an
| open source license to a source available and I would like more
| project adopt this approach from the beginning of their projects,
| to set people's expectation right.
| simiones wrote:
| Which would be very relevant if anyone were trying to sue them
| for this - which no one is.
|
| The license establishes the limits of legal requirements and
| responsibilities. It doesn't shield you from criticisms and
| people being annoyed with you.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Why? The maintainer in the link chooses to be a dick and refuses
| to explain literally any of the weird decisions they've been
| making. That would at least help people understand?
| ksajadi wrote:
| I think both sides of this argument are correct:
|
| 1. MinIO is a business and they don't owe anything to anyone for
| free. 2. People using the OSS version also are free to express
| their dissatisfaction.
|
| This is not contract law though. This is about using OSS as a
| marketing gimmick to get mindshare, penetrate the market and then
| do a bait and switch.
|
| From one hand, it is within their right to do whatever they want
| as marketing. From the other hand, we as the community should be
| more aware of OSS as marketing vs OSS as we would like to see it.
|
| There is a damage to the community however: this erodes trust in
| OSS companies, so just like "content marketing" or "influencers"
| or any other type of marketing, after a while it loses its
| effectiveness, to the detriment of real "content", real
| "influence" and real "OSS".
| goku12 wrote:
| I agree with all the points you make. Just adding a detail to
| the following bit:
|
| > 1. MinIO is a business and they don't owe anything to anyone
| for free.
|
| I don't think MinIO discontinuing the free docker image is
| really the problem here. Creating and distributing such images
| cost them practically nothing - either in infrastructure costs
| or in HR costs. If they find it that difficult, they only need
| to say it. Either the community or another company will gladly
| take it up for free. Even other cloud projects have alternative
| distributions like Bitnami builds.
|
| The real issue is the pattern of behavior that this move
| exposes. They seem to have removed the web UI from the
| community edition claiming that it's hard to maintain (another
| thing the community would have gladly taken up if they were
| informed). They also stopped updating the community
| documentation. And these largely escaped attention until the
| docker build was discontinued. That itself is controversial
| since much effort wasn't spent in letting the users know that
| their current image was going to suffer bitrot indefinitely.
| Apparently there was also a CVE which was fixed in the source.
| They didn't consider it necessary to at least push the fixed
| container as a final measure.
|
| All these are certainly hostile and unkind towards the
| community and it's bordering on dishonesty. They didn't lie.
| But neither did they do the bare minimum expected when taking
| such a drastic measure. It's clear that they're withdrawing
| their generosity for more profits after gaining a lot of
| mindshare with their earlier offering. I don't believe that the
| docker image alone would have inflamed the community so much.
| jmull wrote:
| People should understand from the outset that open source
| contributions from for-profit companies _must_ benefit that
| company.
|
| For VC-backed companies -- or anything else where it's spend
| now, profit later -- the bait-and-switch is practically
| inevitable.
|
| (Or, of course, the company can simply stop contributing,
| either from going out-of-business, or pivoting, or being
| acquired, etc.)
|
| If you're considering building long term on oss from a for-
| profit company you should _count on_ having to pay in the
| future. You should believe you have a decent understanding of
| their business model so you have an idea of how much you might
| need to pay. Of course that 's usually very difficult for VC-
| backed "spend now, pay later" companies, so you might be best
| off avoiding them for anything long-term or foundational unless
| you think you can bear to switch, possibly on short notice.
| ksajadi wrote:
| I generally agree with your point. Over the years of being
| responsible for technology stack choices, I've come to apply
| one rule of thumb on OSS projects: is the project a core
| competency of the company behind it or not. For example,
| Github might open source their language detection library or
| Shopify might open source some frontend development project.
| These are not core competencies of Github or Shopify. Their
| business is somewhere else.
|
| However, if I start a business and open source my core
| competency, with or without VC money, I will have to turn a
| profit or die, which leads to such outcomes, from MinIO to
| Hashicorp.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| lmao
|
| they dont learn anything after redis case are they????
| elAhmo wrote:
| I regret recommending using at in our team.
|
| This move can't be anything else other than malicious.
| canto wrote:
| It's absolutely stunning that people actually defend this
| behaviour!
|
| The community is having an outrage - and rightfully so - about a
| silently discontinued artifact delivery at a very critical time.
| Which is their opinion and every human being is entitled to have
| their own opinion and state it openly.
|
| It is also perfectly fine to expect a standardised behaviour to
| continue.
|
| However, what is most important is that is perfectly fine to
| shame an open source product for pulling features and money
| grabbing people after years of gathering community and locking
| them in.
| atemerev wrote:
| I don't understand the point. The entire raison d'etre of this
| project is that you self-host it and don't pay money for S3 and
| control your supply chain.
|
| If you are denied this possibility -- it is much easier just to
| use S3.
| Tepix wrote:
| Denied as in ,,use their supplied Dockerfile and type 'docker
| build'"?
| whalesalad wrote:
| I don't think the people in this thread have any concept of how
| much $$$ it costs to distribute a free container that is going
| to be downloaded billions of times.
|
| You are a farmer, not a big fancy profitable one. Your tractor
| is from 1970 and works great, when it works. Your wife has
| health problems and can't really help out around the farm much
| - kids have gone off - so you just do things mostly by
| yourself. With your lucky dog Skip by your side. Even though
| times are tough and money ain't coming in like it used to - you
| still give free produce to the local schools and shelters.
| You've been doing it for over 20 years, and the community loves
| you for it.
|
| But then your wife passes. Medical bills are too high. You
| can't give away free produce to the local schools anymore.
|
| The community is outraged. They come to your farm with
| pitchforks. They set your barn and fields on fire.
|
| This is kinda what this thread feels like lol.
| lemagedurage wrote:
| But when you plug in the numbers: that the farmer raised $126
| million, and hosting unlimited Docker Hub pulls costs
| $11/month, it doesn't quite feel the same.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| > I don't think the people in this thread have any concept of
| how much $$$ it costs to distribute a free container that is
| going to be downloaded billions of times.
|
| Not very much at all. It looks like they're hosting on Docker
| Hub which doesn't charge for bandwidth. I could create a pro
| account for $11/month and be able to serve an image billions
| of times. The compute to build an image is small enough that
| it can be done at whim on a dev machine.
| canto wrote:
| It's absolutely not what is happening.
|
| It's more like the farmer was giving leftovers for free to
| schools and it was so good that it made him famous. People
| from all over the country came in, including businessmen who
| told the farmer he is missing out and should be charging more
| for his food. He started a restaurant chain but, the
| businessmen went further and said that a quality product
| cannot be given away for free and made him stop supporting
| schools and shelters which got him rich and famous in the
| first place. Even tho, he was just handing over leftovers (it
| cost around USD 100 to host a docker image - yearly)
|
| Think EA, Microsoft and Xbox, Broadcom and bitnami.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| More projects should do this.
| didip wrote:
| I never understood Minio. Why not just use S3? Why not just use
| Ceph?
|
| If you need just the interface for dev environment, I am sure
| Claude can cobble it together in 1 day.
|
| This seems like a maneuver of a dying company.
| mirax wrote:
| A developer not offering builds themself is a common thing in
| package managers, like apt or pacman. I don't get why it should
| be any different for Docker images.
| Kevinmetaba wrote:
| I've been testing the RustFS product for over a month now. While
| there are some minor bugs, Rust is very stable.
|
| Why didn't YC invest in such a great product?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Quite a downward spiral for them. Wow. I mean I get the yearning
| for turning a profit, but this is yikes. This is the type of
| thing that guarantees most people using your open source / free
| variant never return.
| anacrolix wrote:
| Open source is sick. Everyone wants it (both to maintain a
| successful project, and to use them) until you maintain a popular
| project for a reasonable time then your realise you're getting
| used for fuck all value.
|
| We need a healthy way to support open source developers. This
| isn't working. Companies are taking advantage, and individuals
| are overwhelmed with choice and have delusional expectations.
| nunez wrote:
| It would be cool if The Linux Foundation had a fund to support
| open-source devs with stuff, like a stipend or hosting costs,
| kind of like what exists in the hospitality space. I know that
| this sort-of exists, but it feels distributed amongst a few big
| companies and is entirely at the whims of their quarterly
| performance.
| kolja005 wrote:
| What are folks doing who were just using it for CI/test/dev
| environments? Just build the image yourself? Use Garage as some
| have suggested? I'm curious what people see as the pros and cons.
| vishnukvmd wrote:
| It seems like they've pivoted from being a FOSS alternative to
| AWS S3 to whatever AIStore[1] is.
|
| [1]: https://www.min.io/product/aistor
| jd24 wrote:
| Surprised by the entitlement of some people. This was FREE labor
| they were providing, it was never going to last forever.
| film42 wrote:
| They created their business on open source. Free software was
| their top of funnel. Free customers become paid customers, and
| fund the business. They are more than welcome to change this,
| but there is no way they don't end up with egg on their face,
| and that's what we're seeing here.
| fithisux wrote:
| Imagine having to build LibreOffice from source to get it
| installed
|
| e.g. on Windows
|
| Not bad as long the scripts as there.
| mikey_p wrote:
| No need to get mad or upset about this at all, MinIO is telling
| us exactly who they are:
|
| They want to be a commercial software vendor, and they don't like
| open source.
|
| As long as they aren't advertising their product as open source,
| I don't see an issue.
| wczekalski wrote:
| We moved to Seaweedfs around one year ago and I couldn't be
| happier. It also fixed all of the performance problems we had on
| MinIO.
| _nhh wrote:
| https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
| msarrel wrote:
| It's sad to see a company that built itself using (and yes I
| purposely choose the word using) the community abandon the
| community in pursuit of maximal profit.
| gigatexal wrote:
| what a terrible turn ... screw 'em
|
| so what're you folks moving to? spinning up a local minio
| instance was what I always sprung for when doing local testing of
| s3 things...
|
| Edit: 9.4k stars. Looks compelling.
| https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs
| andruby wrote:
| I hadn't seen the news about MinIO yet.
|
| For others that are surprised by this, it seems that there is a
| fork of the UI called OpenMaxIO
|
| https://github.com/OpenMaxIO/openmaxio-object-browser
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I used MinIO for local dev. I can use S3 or R2 in some cases
| instead. Kinda crazy to find out that people use these Docker
| images in production. Why on earth would you do that?
| aakkaakk wrote:
| This is a clear Rugpull and Enshittification, no matter what
| perspective you have.
| cyberax wrote:
| Any recommendations for a simple S3 implementation for a local
| docker-compose development setup for mocking S3? Ideally with a
| nice UI to check/manipulate files.
| icemelt8 wrote:
| Once again people will find out that no software should be free.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I don't think this is really a big deal. Plenty of others already
| maintain public OCI images of Minio (Bitnami is one example). So
| long as that's the case, there are options. I'm not familiar with
| Minio's licensing terms, so maybe they can put an end to that
| practice if they want to, but I suspect there are drop-in
| replacements other than the official Minio Docker Hub image.
|
| What Minio is doing wrong here is thinking too highly of
| themselves. Their product is a fine implementation of
| S3-compatible object storage. It has some features that make it
| attractive for selfhosting. It's far from the only solution,
| though. The harder they make it to use, the more people are going
| to switch to easier alternatives.
|
| A lot of companies try to lock down their popular open
| source/free products once they have a large market share. It
| always backfires.
|
| Hashicorp did this. There's no reason to use Terraform anymore;
| OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement that is just as good for almost
| everyone, and all the community support will shift to it such
| that it will inevitably be far superior to Terraform.
|
| Redis became Valkey. MySQL became MariaDB. OwnCloud became
| Nextcloud.
|
| There are countless examples. Yeah, the commercial entities
| continue to exist. For companies that need support and contracts,
| there will still be a market. But they are destroying their
| pipeline for new customers. Why would anyone use a closed
| commercial project with no community contribution when there's a
| free, open source option that's either a 100% compatible drop-in
| replacement or a low-effort pivot to a functionally-equivalent
| solution without vendor lock-in and burdensome restrictions?
|
| Minio is shooting themselves in the foot. Most people don't give
| a crap what's backing their object storage, so long as it works.
| baobun wrote:
| > Plenty of others already maintain public OCI images of Minio
| (Bitnami is one example).
|
| Looks like that's coming to an end too.
|
| https://community.broadcom.com/tanzu/blogs/beltran-rueda-bor...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45048419
| caymanjim wrote:
| Yeah, I saw that recently. linuxserver.io bundles a lot of
| apps into OCI images, and I use many of theirs because they
| tend to be better-designed than official ones--or at least
| more consistent.
|
| And while some people might be intimidated by it, it's not a
| huge lift to make your own images. I don't mean to trivialize
| it, because it's at best inconvenient, and can be
| challenging. In many cases it's only a few minutes of work to
| bundle something up. LLMs are great at this. For a Golang app
| like Minio, it's a piece of cake, since you don't have to
| install a zillion dependencies manually.
| vanillax wrote:
| Garage for s3 emulation is a great tool.
| https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
| ktosobcy wrote:
| /me waiting for all complaining about lack of docker image to
| step up and start providing those images ]:->
| mobileturdfctry wrote:
| This is interesting. I've recently been doing quite a bit of
| research into what my "future stack" is going to be for backend.
| MinIO regularly came onto my radar but one heuristic (among many)
| I use to determine which software is TRULY open source and which
| is far less likely to remain open source is whether they even
| provide a link to their Github page and prominently display it on
| their website. MinIO was triggering my "not really open source"
| radar for this reason.
|
| I'm still dabbling but have kind of latched onto the idea of
| using Ceph. To my understanding they were acquired by RedHat, and
| the project has all the signs of real open source, including the
| fact that it originated as a doctoral research project at the
| University of California, Santa Cruz, with initial funding from
| the U.S. Department of Energy.
| digikata wrote:
| Incidentally there is a open source S3 project in rust that I
| have been following. About a year ago, I applied Garage images to
| replace some minio instances used in CI pipelines - lighter
| weight and faster to come up.
|
| https://github.com/deuxfleurs-org/garage
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-22 23:00 UTC)