[HN Gopher] OpenMaxIO: Forked UI for MinIO Object Storage
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OpenMaxIO: Forked UI for MinIO Object Storage
Author : nimbius
Score : 163 points
Date : 2025-10-23 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I feel sorry for the OMIO maintainer community considering how
| entitled the MinIO community revealed themselves to be.
| Spivak wrote:
| Step 1: I made this thing and am freely giving it away for the
| benefit of everyone. Come join the party!
|
| Step 2: Wow, because this is a community project I can depend
| on it continuing to exist freely thanks to a large base of
| diverse parties invested in its continued growth and
| availability.
|
| Step 3: Just kidding, I'm taking back the thing I made. Sorry
| if you were depending on it, migrate to something else or pay
| me.
|
| Step 4: WTF dude?!
|
| Step 5: Why are you all so entitled?
| michaelgiba wrote:
| They stopped publishing images, not like they changed
| anything significant about the product itself.
|
| Frankly the whole thing is not newsworthy
| JokerDan wrote:
| > not like they changed anything significant about the
| product itself
|
| They had already done this months ago, they changed the
| licence and stripped a lot of the code of their admin
| UI/object browser. So a lot of the features vanished for
| people overnight if they updated. This is what the OP is
| linked to - a fork at the point that they did this. This
| was work already done, feature already widely in use, they
| decided to take it out of what was available to the
| community.
|
| So the product has significantly changed and offering had
| been reduced. That in addition to the stopping of
| publishing images - both without notice - caused a decent
| bit off community 'wtf'.
| 0x457 wrote:
| https://github.com/minio/object-browser/issues/3546
| ianbutler wrote:
| What is so hard about the idea that you are not perpetually
| entitled to the free labor of other people?
|
| The only thing they owed people here was a 60 day notice imo.
| That would better respect the social contract.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm not. If they had simply said, "Hey this is getting to
| be too much work and I don't want to continue anymore. Let
| me know if you're interested in taking over maintainership
| of the project." then that's fine. Hell even if they just
| archived the project and ghosted never to be seen again
| that's also fine.
|
| It's (yet another) example of a company donning the
| trappings of an open source project as a "growth hack" or
| to secure VC funding and then rug pulling when they decide
| they want to try and squeeze their user base for cash.
| They're the corporate stooges that insert themselves into
| high-trust communities and subcultures to make a buck and
| ruin it for everyone.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I mean is it though? They've been open source for over a
| decade thats a really long con I guess.
|
| It's more likely circumstances have changed. Which is why
| forking is a thing and you dont have to be oss forever.
|
| I stand by my assertion that this would have been fine if
| they didn't communicate like garbage. They should have
| said what you said and gave a good off ramp period.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I agree with you. But people are allowed to complain, so
| they're complaining. And the maintainers are allowed to
| ignore the complaining. Everything is according to the
| process.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Yeah I suppose you're right
| evilduck wrote:
| There was a 60 days notice? https://blog.min.io/
|
| The only notice I have received is from the blowback of
| their behavior. Walking away from supporting the open
| source product at any other time than in the wake of a
| security vulnerability disclosure would have been received
| better. Sure they're not legally culpable for fixing
| anything but they're now obviously untrustworthy as a
| business partner going forwards.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Oh then like I don't even see the problem. That said I
| think like a direct notification through email or
| something is probably better than random blog post, but I
| digress:
|
| They planned to walk away earlier as I believe I saw its
| really just unfortunate timing.
|
| If you're doing business with them you should be on a
| business license with a contract and legal guarantees. I
| understand it sucks, but it's a little bit of a self own
| imo if you're only on their oss for business purposes.
| That also kind of breaks the social contract in the
| opposite direction imo.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Oh then like I don't even see the problem. That said I
| think like a direct notification through email or
| something is probably better than random blog post, but I
| digress:
|
| How would they know your email if you are using minio-
| oss? Blog post is for sure enough. Decision itself is
| dumb, it's a public repo with free runners to build
| images that downloaded 10M times. That behavior is much
| different how you had to go somewhere else to get OpenJDK
| binaries.
|
| Maintaining existing build pipeline is nearly zero cost.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Doesn't matter it's not your call.
|
| People should begin to think about these externalities. I
| do.
|
| If you're using them for business you should probably
| have a more formal arrangement where they could email
| you.
| binarymax wrote:
| Hey I know picking names is hard, but this is the first time I've
| ever been on the other end of a collision like this.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Why "open". The point here is freedom. You're going to give RMS
| an ulcer poor fellow.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I'll take it over "libre"
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Yeah I hate libre too, but wouldn't FreeMaxIO be better?
| koolba wrote:
| How about Hosted Better Max IO? Can be called HBO Max for
| short.
| wmf wrote:
| I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're
| refering to as HBO Max, is in fact, Netflix/Max, or as
| I've recently taken to calling it, Netflix plus HBO.
| bdcravens wrote:
| How about More Gain FreeMin
| PedroBatista wrote:
| What's up with the naming of rage forked projects?
|
| OpenMaxIO, Forgejo, Valkey, OpenTofu..
|
| Some worse than the others, but still..
|
| Btw, MinIO making these not "open open-source" moves should not
| be a surprise. Since the beginning, YEARS ago their own CEO, lead
| people talked in a way it was clear they wanted to follow the
| Hashicorp book, a few years later they've taken quite a few
| hundreds of millions in investment.
|
| So let's not be childish, adopt it for what it is and when it
| happens adapt it for what it is.
| mholt wrote:
| Wait'll you hear about:
|
| - https://github.com/WedgeServer/wedge
|
| - https://github.com/tmpim/casket
|
| Both forks of Caddy...
| snug wrote:
| I don't get your point about naming. What would you have them
| named? OpenMaxIO seems different than any of the other ones you
| listed. They wouldn't have been able to name it OpenMinIO
| without some legal problems.
| nunez wrote:
| OpenTofu is a "best of a bad situation" kind of thing. The
| project was originally called OpenTF, which makes sense since
| Terraform config code almost always ends in `.tf`, but
| HashiCorp sent out the lawyers, so they had to change names.
| Plus, it goes well with OpenBao, their Vault fork.
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
|
| (submitted title was "OpenMaxIO is a community-maintained fork of
| MinIO"; we've replaced it with what the article says, per
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
| parliament32 wrote:
| > forked from minio/object-browser
|
| > This is a fork of MinIO Console.
|
| > JavaScript 75.2%
|
| It seems this is just a community-maintained fork of the minio
| UI, not minio itself.
| sprior wrote:
| Looks like it's a clone of the browser UI, not the MinIO server
| (like I was expecting any minute now based on their recent
| news).
| bananadonkey wrote:
| Isn't this just the UI and not the minio storage server itself?
|
| Title is misleading if so
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| This is not minio. Its minio UI.
| 0xC0ncord wrote:
| "Community-maintained" is quite a stretch considering the
| repository has had no activity since the fork and name change.
| pxc wrote:
| This hitting the front page made me do a web search review what's
| going on with MinIO, and... turns out it's still 100% F/OSS,
| released under the AGPLv3.
|
| This is absolutely not comparable to something like OpenTofu,
| OpenBao, Forgejo, etc. (I guess it's more like recent CentOS
| forks, like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, or whatever.)
|
| Personally, I think supporting it would be regrettable. MinIO is
| fine.
| mastax wrote:
| MinIO has gotten rid of the admin UI from the OSS version and
| is erasing documentation. Even if they stop here that's enough
| to need a community fork, but I don't expect them to stop here.
| Their obvious intent is for the OSS version to only be useful
| as a trial version of the commercial paid product.
| avoutic wrote:
| MinIO gutted the UI recently. Actually fully removed it from
| the codebase.
|
| So you either have to stick to a vulnerable version or have no
| een UI.
|
| This form seems to target just that. So for the UI kinda
| similar actually.
| max-privatevoid wrote:
| MinIO has a CLA, so they're in the exact same situation as
| HashiCorp, just not as far ahead.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _MinIO stops distributing free Docker images_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665452 - Oct 2025 (499
| comments)
| mbreese wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure how their commercial offering works. It
| looks like it's a commercial fork of MinIO, but I wasn't able to
| find anything about assigning copyright for pull requests in
| their Github. (I didn't look that hard).
|
| But, if the main product is 100% F/OSS AGPL, how are they
| accepting code from outside contributors and still maintaining a
| private enterprise offering under (presumably) a different
| license?
| kevinastone wrote:
| This was in response to MinIO/AIStor removing the browser-console
| UI from the community offering (locking it behind enterprise
| licensing) a few months back.
|
| Unfortunately, this fork has not developed any traction. It's
| last commit was 4 months ago basically after the initial fork and
| instantly became dormant.
|
| You can see the list of 'Still alive?' issues:
| https://github.com/OpenMaxIO/openmaxio-object-browser/issues...
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(page generated 2025-10-23 23:01 UTC)