[HN Gopher] Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires ...
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Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to
run
Author : ecshafer
Score : 121 points
Date : 2026-03-23 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| garrettjoecox wrote:
| "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself
| become the villain"
| stanac wrote:
| So is local stack dead? Is this situation the lesser evil? Or
| is it not dead and we will see a villain rise?
|
| Edit: I see now, they have commercial offerings:
| https://www.localstack.cloud/pricing
|
| I am not sure if my corp will be willing to pay or tell us to
| find something else, but I use it everyday, our integration
| tests depend on local stack.
| ksajadi wrote:
| Complete coincidence but today I was looking for an AWS mock for
| E2E tests. Not the whole AWS footprint but just a few services
| and looked at LocalStack for the first time.
|
| It took Claude to put together a service (with web interface and
| everything) for those 2 services 15 mins.
|
| I'm not claiming my experience is translated universally but
| perhaps if your core competency is something like LocalStack you
| need to think about alternative business ideas.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Well LLMs are trained on code like those from Localstack, and a
| lot of them can be emulated to first order as CRUD operations,
| so its rather unsurprising. It does mean that things do become
| difficult for pure tech SaaS businesses like this one, and as
| also seen with Tailwind.
| matt_callmann wrote:
| What are the alternatives? I primarily used it for S3 and SQS
| emulation.
| kadoban wrote:
| I haven't evaluated it deeply yet, but I saw
| https://github.com/hectorvent/floci
| pfix wrote:
| I've fiddled around with
| https://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/docs/server_mode.html
|
| It didn't support the one thing I wanted but it was so easy to
| find the right place in the code, I was happy. Never got to
| continue it though or turn it into a PR
| luis_cho wrote:
| I am about to test this one
| http://docs.getmoto.org/en/latest/index.html
| cyberax wrote:
| For S3 emulation, I'm using rustfs. It's very compact and fast
| to run, and you can just start it with `docker run` inside
| tests if you don't want to set up a full integration test
| harness.
|
| I used an SQS-on-top-of-Redis emulation before, but I can't
| recommended it now (no updates for 6 years).
| bytK7 wrote:
| I haven't used this yet, but there's also
| https://github.com/robotocore/robotocore. It came up on HN a
| few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619.
| atls wrote:
| It's not a complete replacement, but if you're in a Python
| ecosystem, you might find Moto to be of interest.
|
| https://github.com/getmoto/moto
| henriks wrote:
| at least some parts of localstack seemed to be built on moto,
| based on a brief look at some point
| strickjb9 wrote:
| MinIO is a drop in replacement for S3. I plan on switching to
| this as soon as I can. For now, I just pinned localstack to
| 4.14.0
| zanecodes wrote:
| >MinIO
|
| I have some bad news for you:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000041
| kaelin wrote:
| It's comedic that they said that right after Minio pulled
| the same thing as localstack.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| RustFS is a good and simple-to-usr alternative for MinIO.
| egorfine wrote:
| > I plan on switching to this as soon as I can
|
| Too late.
| iaaan wrote:
| I evangelized localstack at my company a while back, but as we
| integrated it deeper into our CI test runs we started running
| into more and more things they don't support, and it feels
| impossible to get any attention from their support/devs despite
| being paying customers.
|
| Their Cloud Pod and ephemeral instance features in particular
| feel pretty half-baked and not very useful at the moment.
|
| Fun tangent: it's pretty easy to write a crack for the pro
| version; we actually used that for about a month as a pilot to
| confirm that it would do what we needed it to.
| redwood wrote:
| I too was excited about the idea originally but then started
| realizing that they will have an increasingly untenable service
| area to try and maintain and mimic and it was just never going
| to work out.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It does seem like LLMs might make that a real proposition; of
| course, after these commercial enterprises steal copyright,
| copyleft and open source code, and the tooling gets good
| enough to download their cars, a new legion of DMCA lawyers
| and lobbies will be unleashed.
|
| Prep yourself though for that napster bloom, it'll be here
| shortly.
| tecleandor wrote:
| They still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they
| have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0]
|
| It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been
| using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open
| source to bootstrap their business?
|
| Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the
| repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like
| it hasn't be very, let's say, ethical.
|
| -- 0:
| https://opencollective.com/localstack#category-ABOUT
| armchairhacker wrote:
| "Open core" is when part of the product is open-source and part
| is private.
|
| Was a significant part of the product private before this
| announcement?
|
| If not, someone can fork the repo and immediately launch a
| competitor (FOSS or paid). (Technically even if so, except it
| wouldn't be immediate, and if they'd have to re-implement too
| much, it would be easier to start from scratch.)
| thefreeman wrote:
| yes, there were a large number of AWS products and features
| that were only available with a subscription
| thayne wrote:
| Yes there were significant portions that were proprietary
| before this, including support for some services.
|
| The parts that were open source might still be worth forking,
| but you would probably need to change every occurrence of the
| name to avoid trademark issues.
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for
| however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but
| stop sharing ... and you're upset?!?
|
| They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it
| wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all
| their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook
| good participant.
|
| Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why
| aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are?
| imiric wrote:
| How can people still not understand that OSS can be abused?
|
| It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available.
| Nobody can technically delete it from the internet, so that's
| hardly something they did "right".
|
| The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to
| rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it
| themselves. All of this creates friction, and fragments the
| community.
|
| And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls?
| It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when
| they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting
| corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in
| this case, shut down the OSS project altogether. None of this
| is being a "textbook good participant".
|
| > Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why
| aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are?
|
| Frankly, there are many companies with proprietary products
| that behave more ethically and have more respect for their
| users than this. The fact that a project is released as OSS
| doesn't make it inherently better. Seeing OSS as a "free
| gift" is a terrible way of looking at it.
| inetknght wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
|
| You might want to get your arguments in order. In one
| sentence you're calling OSS rugpulls a problem, and then in
| another you're claiming that proprietary products behave
| more ethically.
|
| So which is it? Is it less-ethical to have provided
| software as open source, and then later become a
| proprietary product? Why? I see having source code, even
| for an old/unmaintained product be strictly superior to
| having _never_ provided the source code no matter how much
| "respect" the company has for their users today.
| imiric wrote:
| You might want to think about my argument a bit more.
|
| > Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open
| source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why?
|
| Because usually these companies use OSS as a marketing
| gimmick, not because they believe in it, or want to
| contribute to a public good. So, yes, this dishonesty is
| user hostile, and some companies with proprietary
| products do have more respect for their users. The
| freedoms provided by free software are a value add on top
| of essential values that any developer/company should
| have for the users of their software. OSS projects are
| not inherently better simply because the code is free to
| use, share, and modify.
|
| To be fair, I don't think a developer/company should be
| expected to maintain an OSS project indefinitely.
| Priorities change, life happens. But being a good OSS
| steward means making this transition gradually, trying to
| find a new maintainer, etc., to avoid impacting your
| existing user base. Archiving the project and demanding
| payment is the epitome of hostile behavior.
| jrflowers wrote:
| It seems like you're trying to build a system of ethics
| around being annoyed by OSS maintainers not working for
| free in perpetuity.
|
| Having access to Apache licensed code that you can build
| off of is better than never having access to no code at
| all. Anything else about values or respect has to be
| inferred or imagined and has no bearing on the software
| itself.
| ianbutler wrote:
| That's what they always do it always comes down to a
| sense of perpetual entitlement over the work of others,
| work they themselves would never do.
|
| I've had the same discussion for years now on HN. It is
| not unethical to decide to stop supporting something
| especially if you played by all the rules the entire
| time.
|
| No one is owed perpetual labor and they completely
| disregard localstack has been oss for something like 10
| years at this point just celebrate it had a good run,
| fork and maintain yourself if you need it that badly.
|
| It is incredibly weird to think something that was
| maintained oss for 10 years is a rugpull that's just
| called life, circumstances change.
| skeledrew wrote:
| It's a matter of honesty and trust. A company that has
| never provided source code is more honest and trustworthy
| than one that provides source code, extracts community
| labor (by accepting issues and/or PRs) and then makes off
| with said labor (even if they left a frozen version
| available) at a future point.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > It doesn't matter that the previous code is still
| available...The original maintainers are gone, and users
| will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or
| maintain it themselves.
|
| It does matter: popular products have been forked or the
| open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and
| OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO
| and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the
| former was FOSS and it's a "drop-in binary replacement",
| I'm sure they looked at the code for reference...)
|
| If your environment doesn't have API changes and
| vulnerabilities, forking requires practically zero effort.
| If it does, the alternative to maintaining yourself or
| convincing someone to maintain it for you (e.g. with
| donations), is having the original maintainers keep working
| for free.
|
| Although this specific product may be mostly closed source
| (they've had commercial addons before the announcement). If
| so, the problem here is thinking it was open in the first
| place.
| lukevp wrote:
| I thought Valkey was the blessed fork of Redis. Is Redict
| better in some way?
| jalalx wrote:
| So basically businesses should go bankrupt because making
| money is "unethical"
| tedk-42 wrote:
| Open Source Software doesn't mean maintenance free.
|
| The code is all there mate.
|
| Their time and efforts and ongoing contributions to the
| project are not.
|
| OSS is not about fairness and free work from people. It's
| just putting the code out there in public.
| etchalon wrote:
| Because this thread isn't about those other companies.
| skeledrew wrote:
| > a company shared their work with the public for however
| long, then decided to leave what was shared up
|
| More like a company took advantage of a community that
| expected their freely offered labor to _not_ be
| commercialized at any point in time _without_ making
| available said works in a fully free vector as well, as that
| 's an implicit expectation behind "open source".
| reactordev wrote:
| Naive fools...
|
| Companies stand to turn a profit. OSS is here to help
| enable that or push the goal posts. It's not a charity
| unless the org feels charitable. Sure, non-profits exist
| but they were never one of those.
| papyrus9244 wrote:
| > and left all their code available, as required by OSS.
|
| IANAL, and I don't have a horse in this race, but I don't
| think that's required by OSS, not by the spirit of "the law",
| and (at least) not by GPL, MIT, and other similar mainstream
| licenses.
|
| The spirit of open source is: you buy (or just download for
| free) a binary, you get the 4 rights. Whatever happens when
| the developer/company stops distributing (whether at a cost
| or free as in beer) that binary is completely outside the
| scope of the license.
| jayofdoom wrote:
| More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software
| in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in
| on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-
| free.
|
| It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open
| source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile
| ecosystem for building open source tooling against.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| Running OpenStack for this is a massive project cost compared
| to spinning up a few local services, and the operational mess
| is on a different planet from "I need to fake a handful of API
| calls on my laptop". Self-hosting still means updates, drivers,
| and k8s/OpenStack glue code. Nobody sane are doing that for
| local dev, use Minikube or Podman if you want DIY and still
| like weekends.
| jayofdoom wrote:
| I'm saying not that OpenStack can replace LocalStack, but
| instead that LocalStack, by building a project on top of
| proprietary APIs, set themselves up to fail.
| UltraSane wrote:
| OpenStack is one of the most complicated platforms in existence
| and finding suitably talented admins is very hard.
| jayofdoom wrote:
| This is true, sadly -- but the documentation exists and
| community is friendly to those who wanna build those skills.
| It's extremely difficult to build something the size of
| OpenStack without making it so configurable that operating it
| needs a decoder ring. I'm doing everything I can in Ironic to
| make it more friendly and flexible out of the box, but it's a
| difficult problem to solve.
|
| I always tell people: OpenStack can do almost anything you
| want... if you can configure it to do so :).
| egorfine wrote:
| > More reason to run your infrastructure using open source
| software in your own datacenter
|
| Until they stop being open source. Like, you know, LocalStack.
| jayofdoom wrote:
| There's a reason I point out the longevity of OpenStack. As a
| project, it has significant corporate sponsorship and
| policies to ensure that one entity can't take over control of
| it. For instance; the OpenStack Technical Committee is never
| permitted to have a majority membership made up of a single
| entity's employees. This means that even though Red Hat, at
| this stage in it's development, has a majority of
| contribution, the project itself can never be taken over by a
| single entity.
|
| People find project governance, and particularly "corporate"
| involvement in open source to be distasteful -- but in my
| experience, and OpenStack is a winning example of this --
| setting up good boundaries to let companies work together has
| proven to be sustainable.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Did localstack never get bit enough that a fork would emerge or
| am I missing an obvious one?
| stitched2gethr wrote:
| Try proxymock. It's not open source but it is free to use.
| jzelinskie wrote:
| An emulator for integration testing against the major cloud
| providers seems like it should:
|
| 1. be table-stakes for a SDK from the cloud providers themselves
|
| 2. have the obvious home in a foundation like the CNCF; how else
| could you be "cloud native" afterall?
| inglor wrote:
| First minio and then localstack, as an open source maintainer I
| find that abandoning their community is bad faith. I totally get
| wanting to monetize but removing the free product entirely feels
| like such a betrayel.
|
| Luckily, I've been vibing with Devin since this started having it
| build a cleanbox emulator on top of real s3 tuned for my specific
| use case. It's a lot less general but it's much faster and easy
| to add the sort of assertions _I_ need in it. It 's no localstack
| but for my limited use case it works.
| gzread wrote:
| It does _feel_ like a betrayal. We live in a world where money
| is the main thing that matters and it 's increasingly hard to
| come by and you need increasingly more of it (these are all
| designed policies, not emergent behavior). It makes sense that
| people don't want to do things for free unless they already
| have enough money.
|
| Engineers who remained apolitical are now surprised the
| politics is bad.
| obsidianbases1 wrote:
| There's going to be a lot of complaints about open-source
| restricting access.
|
| It's going to keep happening because it just doesn't make sense
| for a lot of previous business models that supported and open-
| source project, something that was seen recently with tailwind.
|
| In one of my projects, one that remains source-available, I had
| encountered an "open-source justice warrior" that made it their
| mission to smear the project because of the switch, grasping at
| straws to do everything they could to paint my intentions as
| malicious.
|
| It's really too bad, and will only hurt the availability of free
| alternatives if one cannot provide the source under a "just don't
| commercially compete with the paid version of the product"
| license without getting branded as a scamming cash grabber
| drnick1 wrote:
| Source available with various arbitrary restriction is non-free
| software. What the "open source warriors" take exception to is
| presenting a project as "open source" or "free" when in reality
| it is not.
| skeledrew wrote:
| A thing cannot be considered free/open source if there are
| restrictions on what users can do with it. If a maintainer
| wishes to put a "don't compete commercially" license then it
| should be clearly labelled as source available, not open
| source. To do otherwise is to deceive the open source
| community, which has a particular and well defined
| understanding of what "open source" entails.
| luipugs wrote:
| Are you arguing that copyleft is not open source?
| mgulick wrote:
| From https://opensource.org/osd:
|
| > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > The
| license must not restrict anyone from making use of the
| program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it
| may not restrict the program from being used in a business,
| or from being used for genetic research.
|
| A non-commercial clause is a discrimination against a field
| of endeavor and thus non-open-source. The license cannot
| restrict how the user is able to *use* the software and
| still be open source. There can however be requirements to
| distribute the source code when distributing the software,
| ala GPL.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| My main complaint about the project changes we've seen lately
| is that these companies are happy to take all the code that
| previous contributors have written for free in good faith, and
| profit off of it without any sharing. The whole reason I and
| many people have contributed to some of the projects out there
| is under the premise that I've been given something
| great/useful for free so I'm going to give back for free. If
| you want to create a project that's source-available or
| whatever you want to call it, from the start, you'll probably
| even get my support.
|
| Sure, it's totally legal for the company to change how they
| operate in the future. But it burns all that good faith of
| previous contributions in favor of profit. And so yeah, I hope
| the companies that pull this crash and burn in proportion to
| how much free code they accepted from contributors that they
| now wish to profit from.
| dbacar wrote:
| I bet they will be deleting code from the archived code just like
| that minio people.
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