MinIO stops distributing free Docker images(github.com) |
MinIO stops distributing free Docker images(github.com) |
https://render.com/docs/deploy-minio
Hopefully this will finally push Render to build their own S3 wrapper.
For others that are surprised by this, it seems that there is a fork of the UI called OpenMaxIO
Can anyone give me some background on why MinIO is/was so used? So many people want to self-host S3 compatible software? Just asking, very curious about the whole thing!
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.
Why didn't YC invest in such a great product?
Exact quote: "it will remain as is, and will only receive security fixes if any”
https://jamesoclaire.com/2025/05/27/how-to-self-host-your-ow...
They've also tried to claim AGPLv3 will infect any networked client code too: "Combining MinIO software as part of a larger software stack triggers your GNU AGPL v3 obligations. The method of combining does not matter. 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." -- they've since removed that, utterly unsupported, argument, but the lesson to take home is they're really trying to prevent any non-paid use.
It really is time to stop using Minio.
You need to be able to do this personally or you should not be running a durable storage cluster in-house. Just pay AWS. You need to add more value to your employer than you cost, and if Anthropic's cheapest model can beat you at such a task then it's not a good look.
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.
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.
If you’re running Minio, odds are you have interesting use cases that are not filled by S3. I wouldn’t make such blanket statements.
I don’t think anyone is surprised that an LLM can help you here either.
If you don't understand the difference between these two issues, I would suggest it is /you/ that lacks the ability to add sufficient value to your employer (as if that's even a standard we should care about We are people, not merely cogs in some VC's wet dream).
The time line is rather short (the README announcing source only releases got updated a week and half ago) but it's not like Docker will let you email everyone and say "you're using one of our products, read this post about our new distribution model", probably for good reason. I can only imagine the "vulnerability" warnings flooding the world if every pulled container opened an avenue for emails.
I wouldn't buy their weird AI product off them after they behave like this, but this is software they've been maintaining and giving away for free, for years. Unless you have a contract with them where they promised maintenance, I don't see why this is on them, really.
The company can go bankrupt tomorrow and you won't even be able to pay them to update their images. Maintaining your dependencies is your responsibility, especially if you're not paying them a dime.
Some actions that they could have taken but didn't:
* Post a public notice on their website with a set date 90+ days out for when they'd shut off CI and stop producing new images
* Add a line to their Docker init script that puts out a deprecation notice with the same date 90+ days out to STDOUT that will get seen/logged on systems using the image
* Send direct communication to their paying customers via email or generated support tickets notifying them of the upcoming deprecation and that they need to switch their deployments to a new image source on a set date 90+ days out.
They could have done all three of these things, they could have done other things also. Most importantly, anything they do should have time for people to digest and respond to the action in a reasonable manner, you should not rug pull people by unilaterally changing something with no prior notice, only telling people about the change as it happens, and immediately causing a problem (no forward path for CVE fixes).
Forks take time and effort from humans to maintain.
They don’t owe you anything.
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.
It's built using Rust and React Router.
Just playing around with it
We all know you don't care about loyalty correctness or anything, you just someone to do the work you're paid for
> nice
> We’ve stopped distributing our software for free
> How dare you!
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
e.g. on Windows
Not bad as long the scripts as there.
they dont learn anything after redis case are they????
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.
Removing existing Docker images? Seems unlikely.
That’s where I interpreted this as a demand.
If they are trying to push people to commercial services I typically attempt to steer away from companies that make rash decisions with a moments notice, rather than ones that would leave you high and dry.
They actually did that by saying that there are no new releases planned and new releases may be cut at anytime and everyone uses them at their own risk.
https://github.com/minio/minio/commit/9e49d5e7a648f00e26f224...
I'm even starting to wonder, should we also drop Docker builds to get the same amount of PR for our open-source project.
From the product side, I don't see how this should affect new adopters who didn't read the hn post yesterday
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.
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.
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.
I even checked the pricing page, and there is no mention of any builds as paid features.
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.
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.
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.
It'll be hard to convince people to buy their commercial offering after pulling something like this.
On the other hand, they did the work for free, so it's up to them to decide when to stop doing that. Plus, anyone can fork the repo and maintain their own version with fixes and docker images and everything.
seriously, minio sucks perf wise but they really did a good job making it easy to deploy with docker
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
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.
You don't even need to fork the project, you can just extend / distribute
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.
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.
> "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."
This move can’t be anything else other than malicious.
THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM *"AS IS"* WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND
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.
The license establishes the limits of legal requirements and responsibilities. It doesn't shield you from criticisms and people being annoyed with you.
But if anyone wants to run their own file storage(so not a client), there is https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs
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.
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.
https://docs.min.io/enterprise/aistor-object-store/installat...
podman pull quay.io/minio/aistor/minio:latest
podman run minio/aistor/minio --version
Do you think Docker binaries are something that could hypothetically drive conversion from AGPL users to commercial licenses?
So no matter what they claim large parts of the codebase are still apache2.
It's not changing the fact that it's too premature to reflect on public adoption at this moment.
Just to clarify, I'm not affiliated with or protecting MinIO, I don't know anything about this software. But it seems to me that there's some overreaction about Docker here, and in reality it is highly possible that this decision might not affect the product the way it's being discussed these days.
In other words, what is the significant difference for your team that's worth changing the stack and navigating through the uncertainty of an alternative product?
It's hard to feel good about remaining hitched to a horse that continues to send out red flags, especially when there are other good options out there for us.
Free users will not pay tens/hundreds of thousands for just binary files.
Obviously this will slow down the adoption of the AGPL version, against which the growth of the paid version potentially will look better in Excel reports for VCs, but something tells me that this is unlikely to be the real reason.
Sad to say but this isn't true. This is a failure to understand the pricing model of this kind of enterprise software.
What happens is the free version is used in some product somewhere. Then product's company gets acquired by HugeBigCo. Product company brain drain happens and HugeBigCo looks at poorly understood free software dependency as a liability. It's cheaper/better-on-the-balance-sheet to pay for a license and a support contract than to move off of that dependency or hire competent people to look after it...For a few years, anyway -- until that business unit is worth investing resources in.
That's how a company like Neo4j can charge a half-million bucks a year for one production cluster and get HugeBigCo as label that they can use to try to convince other companies that this pricing is even remotely reasonable.
Anything enterprise data-storage SaaS related is looking to charge at least a quarter-million a year.
You mean, having MinIO through Docker is like auto-pilot, and without it requires maintenance (that is obviously easier with a commercial license)?
However, I also understand that for any organization it is very painful to change their existing stack, thus I'm trying to understand what is gained between AGPL sources without Docker and switching technology to something different with Docker except 'ease of setup'.
Building something on your own on the other hand is probably easily a half-time engineer just for build quality and dependency tracking.
Huge number of MinIO shops is one head node and 7 jbods in a single rack (giving you more thsn 10PB). And two such racks for redundancy and one offside rack for backup.
Open source means what the license says it means. Expectations and conventions can be broken.
For me open source is a license, and Docker is a distribution feature. From this prospective I can not understand how distributional channel and type of license are related, as code is still AGPL.
And by removing docker images, they are intentionally making open source version a badly engineered version.
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.
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).
No one other than hobbyists is paying full price on AWS.
https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs?tab=readme-ov-file#rustfs-v...
comparing RustFS to MinIO, including a claim about the MinIo support price.
> RustFS is under rapid development. Do NOT use in production environments!
Also note that it seems to be a Chinese company (北京恒河沙科技有限公司), so security issues might arise.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
This is another case of VC-funded companies pulling up the ladder behind themselves.
Best to get insecure and vulnerable software out of the hands of those who may not be familiar with this CVE or their change in policy that has not gotten a press release in any way.
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.
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...
I don't see the problem in either case. For a Gentoo user, it changes nothing.
https://github.com/golithus/minio-builds
Example use:
docker run -p 9000:9000 -p 9001:9001 ghcr.io/golithus/minio:latest
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...
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.
And it is very true. Although the binary does also need building, which is also handled in the above actions workflow.
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.
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".
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://docs.min.io/enterprise/aistor-object-store/administr...
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?
Seriously, what is the rage here, anyone could do this.
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.
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?
At least that's all we use it for really
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.
Turns out most file systems are horrible key-value stores.
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
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).
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?
It'll take more time than just typing out a comment on HN to get all of that in play. Actually getting a docker registry of your own set up with auth and everything can easily take half an hour, and adding+testing periodic sync and compile steps in your CI/CD will take another couple of hours if you're not set up for it.
Hardly the end of the world, though. Reminds me of the infamous "why can't people on github just give me the .exe" reddit troll post.
Time to move on, folks. Dead horse is dead. Kicking it will release toxic decomposition sludge.
What alternatives do people recommend that has at least similar features-set and at least similar performance as MinIO?
Ceph is what I think but there are lot of alternatives.
How times changed.
We have a tendency to stick to what we know but everything changes constantly and us being connected amplifies that.
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.
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.
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>
I do concede that they could’ve done a better job communicating these changes. But they don’t have to.
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.
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
thats entitlement but seen from the other side.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
MinIO is open source cosplay.
I wrote this back in July: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/minio-are-assholes/
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
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/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95....
Giving a notice in advance and releasing a final image that patched the CVE would've been reasonably responsible.
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.
Beggars can't be choosers. It's not fair to not give notice before no longer providing something for free? Come on now.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
Building a quality production ready image is not trivial, and it's always welcomed from the vendor.
The community that made them is being shit on.
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.
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
However, this is also a classic move, so shouldn't be unexpected behavior these days...
Welcome to HN BTW, I see you were inspired to sign up and defend the project owner.
Something that can be plugged into CI.
Perhaps something like this already exists?
> I felt it might be appropriate for me to reach out as one of the stewards of the Docker Official Images program.The minio image is basically a community one that anyone could have created, but still shows in overall docker hub. It's created by minio themselves. I'm kind of surprised they haven't removed it, but with over a billion downloads they are easily in the top ten of whatever category they fall under creating substantial free advertisement.
Why is that the best? MinIO is not the type of thing that people ought to be directly making available on the Internet anyway, so CVEs are mostly irrelevant unless you are an organization that has to keep on top of them, in which case you certainly have a process in place to do so already.
People straight pulling an image off Dockerhub (so not a particularly sophisticated use-case) to run seem like they'd be the least likely to be impacted by a CVE like this. The impact is apparently "[it] allows the attacker to access buckets and objects beyond their intended restrictions and modify, delete, or create objects outside their authorized scope". Are people pulling from Dockerhub even setting up anything but the absolute most basic (Allow All) ACL?
"Hello,
This does not qualify as an infringement to our Terms of Use policy. Deprecating such images and repo(s) is the responsibility of the owner and we recommend you reach out to them. Docker advises its users to opt into using images under our official programs and offerings such as Docker Official Images and Docker Hardened Images.
Thank you, Security@Docker"
In their ToU under section 6.6, they outline how they may scan images for vulnerabilities and request the owners of said packages fix it, or simply remove it from their site. They clearly do not do this though even when notified of the high criticality vulnerability.
I think the most they'd do is add the DEPRECATED note to the Docker hub page as they have done for things like Centos
Actually, Docker did something like that, where they limited the amount of docker images they would host for you for free to a reasonable number. The result was pretty similar to this current outcry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143588
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.
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.
> 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.
Looks like that's coming to an end too.
https://community.broadcom.com/tanzu/blogs/beltran-rueda-bor...
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you are denied this possibility — it is much easier just to use S3.
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.
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.
I love it that you use "elastic" as a verb here.
> We initially explored a basic admin UI for the community branch but haven't actively maintained it. Building and supporting separate graphical consoles for the community and commercial branches is substantial. Honestly, it is hard to duplicate this work for the community branch. A whole team is involved in console development, including design, UX, front-end, back-end, and pen testing. This commit introduces an enhanced object browser but removes the unmaintained admin UI code.
They deleted the admin UI from the current version of the open-source side. It's time to pay the VCs, the project is being rug-pulled and they're going all in on the enterprise version.
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.
Gitlab seemed to do a good job of navigating a community edition as an on-ramp for sales. But it's obviously a lot of work to maintain that edition, and VC must be feeling less geenerous than 10-15 years ago.
e.g. maybe if it were my project I'd have kept back the S3-compatible ACL support and put in something super-basic. Or even cluster support. Right now it feels like they're cutting off everything they can while still being able to call it "open source".
We also had a little grammar-based fuzzer for S3 requests (really, any HTTP), but over the last 10+ years I've lost track of what happened to that code. That found some incompatibilities with allowed character sets etc too.
Thanks tomhow!
Setting up a registry and a pipeline is annoying but it's hardly a life changing event. It's certainly easier than migrating to a competitor.
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.
There are two sides to this coin and tension in between.
On the one side license change rug pulls are annoying and deserve negative consequences.
On the other side, open source users are often far too entitled and demanding, contributing little and taking much.
At the end of the day the license terms are clear and users would do well to expect no more than the license says they’re entitled to expect.
Maybe then everyone can start being pleasantly surprised by each other’s behavior instead of both sides being disappointed by the other.
- GarageFS
- OpenStack Swift
- CEPH Object Gateway Rados
- Riak CS
- OpenIO[1] https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/460629937/our-blessed-homel...
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.
Python and pip are just bad at this.
Passing a GPU through into a docker container requires a lot of permissions and flags to be set up just right, and it's way more difficult if your host operating system isn't natively Linux.
What you're describing is essentially the most difficult imaginable container to maintain.
Maintaining a normal containerized application, especially if you want to put it in maintenance mode forever and basically just leave the container working the same way with up to date code... is essentially zero effort. A few hours a year by one person and certainly something open source that a contributor would be happy to be responsible for.
This isn't the case of a company saving money or time by stopping supporting some onerous container build... they're intentionally kneecapping the open source offering hoping more people will pay for their product, which is scummy.
I had positive feelings about minio until I read this, now I don't want to touch it expecting whatever is next to be even more annoying whether I was paying them or not.
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.
The cargo-culting around security is so bizarre to me. In a context where e.g. your organization needs to pass audits, it's cheaper/easier to just update stuff and not attempt to analyze everything so you can check the box. For everyone else, most security advisories are just noise that usually aren't relevant to the actual way software is used. Notably, no one in these discussions is even bringing up what the vulnerability is.
That's because of two things. The first is, assessment takes a deep dive into the issue, not a summary. Conjoined with the second, in that you must be ready to update if required, without issue.
In every case, it's less time cost even for home lab users to update instead of assess.
If it isn't, you're using terrible software, for example software which pushes security updates along with API and code changes. Such software doesn't take user security seriously, and should be avoided at all costs.
There's no way around it. Just do it right, don't half ass with excuses. Don't use terrible software. If it's plugged into a network, zero trust it is.
Given the developers have not replied to the thread after a day and the one who was enthusiastic is now the one doling out the information that they are no longer supporting their docker image, I highly doubt they will perform a 180 on policy and suddenly work with them to provide an official curated image. If they wanted to keep the docker image alive they would have continued updating it and not shut down community feedback begging for them to maintain it.
Docker has a vested interest in keeping popular images maintained and a billion+ download package suddenly becoming defunct is noticable to them. Minio seems to be prioritizing their commercial offering and removing support for their open source offering though. Nuking their community documentation doesn't spell anything good for the future of minio for the FOSS community.
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.
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...
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.
Funnily enough, such action is outside of their paid product's EULA.
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.
Was under the impression that the answer is yes, they could - with the caveat that they'd have to release the modified source code of whatever backend services are also tied into the Minio source code. For example the AWS control plane that would launch customer instances of Minio, monitor it, etc would also need to be open sourced?
- 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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?
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.
Correct, and that's the most worrying aspect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure factory work was a step upward for these families.
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.
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.
Sounds exactly like freeloading to me. You may think of that term negatively, but it is exactly what it is.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
If they were hoping to drive conversions to paying customers, they've done the opposite, at least with my employer.
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.
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.
that's why you'd 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.
Software on the other hand does not naturally wear out, in the same way physical objects do.
Nobody at commercial volume pays list to AWS - everyone gets a discount.
Some services get large discounts, some don’t. Depends on utilization. For 10k you should get a lot.
We do get discount, but it wont make it cheap.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Don’t like it? Stop being a parasite and pay someone for a support contract.
I don't get why one they would provide prebuilt binaries in the first place, and removing them is just cleanup.
so its a communications issue? if minio or whoever explains this, OK. that's not what happened, so it's not what happened.
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.
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.
But, regardless, my main point was that describing the software in terms of a ratchet is not very helpful because hardware and software are different types of things.
Apple definitely had programs to pay all or part of relevant educational programs, and they sometimes paid for people to attend conferences. I'm sure it was much more restrictive than the HP policy you're describing here, but it was definitely more than nothing.
The difference is that colleges actually educated students, and students were actually there to learn.
Seeking profit above all else is not healthy.
Creating a business used to be done by people who had a skill and wanted to make a living doing it. They wanted their business to be their job. No blacksmiths started a business because they wanted to become rich. They wanted to be blacksmiths, they had pride in their work, and they wanted to have money to live as well.
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.
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).
Let me stop you right there. MiniIO never promised to provide docker images for free forever, have they? So where does this "expectation" come from?
If thou are pained by any external thing, it is not the thing that disturbs thee, but thine own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. (Marcus Aurelius, quoted in Beck, 1976, p. 263)
...It's you who has built the expectation, not MiniIO, for it exists only in your mind.
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.
later: "no one who spends more than $10k/month pays full price"
curious, that no one says what their bills are when they say "40-60% discount", right? This thread started because someone mentioned dell/netapp because they were half the price of AWS, all-in.
I notice a lot of threads do this, lately. Not this topic, but topics in general.
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.
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.
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...
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!"
No one is saying people can't charge for their work though.
Yeah that's in the definition of the word "expectation".
But despite that, expectations based on actions are real, and you can't logic your way out of them mattering.
> ...It's you who has built the expectation, not MiniIO, for it exists only in your mind.
The MinIO team understands very well that they have made everybody "build this expectation [each] in [our] mind[s]". They wouldn't have felt the need to write any announcement that they would stop distributing the binaries otherwise.
> for free forever
This is an exaggeration that grossly misrepresents what I'm saying, and without which your point becomes very weak.
You have two choices here:
(a) acknowledging how your fellow human beings build expectations and, harmed with this critical insight, leave in peace, or
(b) sticking your head in the sand.
I highly recommend the former, especially if you don't want to look like a Vogon.
I'll go further: if someone has been releasing a binary for each version of their software, without specific announcement, it would be unreasonable not to expect a binary for the next version. There's absolutely no reason to think things will be different and the binary won't be there.
Repeating something unreasonable does not make it reasonable.
If I donate to charity for 10 years in a row, someone might come to expect my donation, sure. If I chose to lower or stop my donation, the only response others are entitled to is gratitude for the remaining and past donations. There is no requirement for warning. Heck, in this particular case the whole "charity donation" is still there, just packaged differently. Discontent makes no sense.
People's rude behavior isn't limited to HN comments, they take it everywhere: Reddit, GitHub issues, mailing lists, channels. Nor was my comment specific to this minio news, but rather about people's attitude towards free things in general.
I'm sorry, I don't think we're going to agree. I think it's weird that you're trying to proscribe people's allowed responses, and getting upset that it's not just gratitude.
If you see the world that way, you're never going to see my point which is that humans recognise patterns, and that creates expectations. Price doesn't matter. You can repeat all you want that those expectations should just be gratitude, but they're clearly not, that's why we're having this discussion.
I can't make humans not be pattern recognition machines, but you can update your mental model to accept that they are. If you base your expectations in what we both see in reality, then you'll accept that they're not going to just be gratuitous. That's not because they're horrible people, it's because they're humans that recognise patterns and have a biological cost to patterns being disrupted.
There's nothing weird about classifying behavior as rude, nor about refusing to waste my limited time on this planet on those not deserving of it.
It's an entirely natural part of every-day life to make such distinction, necessary even to avoid things negatively impacting mental health, and I think it's weird to suggest otherwise.
> I can't make humans not be pattern recognition machines, but you can update your mental model to accept that they are.
This translates to "I will not change my stance so you need to change yours". I have no reason to or incentive to change my stance to accept unpleasant, unreasonable or abusive behavior in response to creating free things, so no.
I don't care why someone is being unpleasant, unreasonable or abusive, nor do I need to - I'm not their therapist, and it's perfectly valid for me to just walk away.
> I'm sorry, I don't think we're going to agree.
That's fine.
Granted, I'd prefer if users stopped such unreasonable behavior as it's more healthy to not have toxic interactions than having to mentally ignore them (or worse, respond, report or ban them), but can't win every time. It would've been more productive for the users too.
"Responsibility" is a word mostly thrown about by people making demands as if they are somehow entitled to full service contracts on stuff they got for free - which is especially fun when said provider offers actual service contracts.
It is weird to proscribe that a human should act in an inhuman way, like trying to provide a subset of actions they're allowed to do in response to you - that's not how humans work. It's weird because most people accept that others humans can act how they want, often with some pattern, so when you're saying humans have to act in a particular way, and how they're only entitled to certain actions in response to you: that's weird.
> This translates to "I will not change my stance so you need to change yours".
Sorry, what languages do you think you're translating to/from here? How did it translate the fact that humans are pattern recognition machines into my personal stance which I must change for you? How am I supposed to change this fact that you're unwilling to accept? Why are you unwilling to accept it? It's supported by a lot of inventions literature, and it would make your life and those around you happier?
> I have no reason to or incentive to change my stance to accept unpleasant, unreasonable or abusive behavior in response to creating free things, so no.
like I said, point to this unreasonable or abusive behaviour here - I don't see it - I see you getting upset about humans being humans.
> I don't care why someone is being unpleasant, unreasonable or abusive, nor do I need to - I'm not their therapist, and it's perfectly valid for me to just walk away.
So why haven't you walked away from me? :)
No, it is weird to suggest that just because humans do something it becomes "human" and acceptable (it is not), just like it's weird to suggest that humans generally accept this (they don't).
Theft, abuse (verbal or physical), slavery, murder, rape, etc., are all "human" in that many humans do it, might have it stem from relatively natural urges, and might have internally reasoned that their actions are sound and justified. It is normal and accepted to classify certain human behaviors as "wrong" and unacceptable. See: any country with a legal system.
Outside legal concepts, humans also strongly and explicitly discriminate in who they find acceptable and pleasant by virtue of including (and exclusion) from their social circles and choice of partner, with responses ranging from procreation to complete exclusion, active avoidance and even intense reactions upon unwanted meetings.
Actions have consequence, and accepting/including an abusive individual is masochism.
> How did it translate the fact that humans are pattern recognition machines into my personal stance
The problem here is that you confuse the concept of "fact" with "opinion". Your definition of humans as "pattern recognition machines" is neither fact nor decisive in the matter. It's just an idea and belief that you personally prescribe to, which I neither agree with nor find relevant.
If anything, we're stimuli-optimizing, work-minimizing procreation machines, and neither that nor your description is relevant to the discussion. Even if we did fit your description, it has no implication on the outcome of "acceptable behavior".
> So why haven't you walked away from me? :)
Discussing unreasonable and abusive behavior is not the same as enacting or experiencing unreasonable or abusive behavior. Imagine if you got a speeding ticket for dicussing that speeding should be okay.
Granted, I might walk away anyway by virtue of the discussion being rather unproductive, but hey it's my time on the planet and so only I get to decide if I want to waste it. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it? Let's take a look at the opposite scenario: What if MinIO never released any source code at all? They'd be just another 100% proprietary company like any other and would have never received any backlash for "pulling up the ladder behind them". So offering something for free and then rescinding later is treated worse than never offering anything for free at all!
What a way to entice companies to do open source guys, great job!
This is true plenty of times. In particular, if you violate social expectations/etc, you will often see this.
For example, here's an easy case:
I am about to go plant a bunch of trees.
A neighbor sees me going to do it, and offers to do it for me for free, because they like to do it.
I say cool. They can even say "just so you know, i'm not your contractor, blah blah blah" or whatever. Doesn't matter.
I go do something else with my time.
A week later, they did half the job, and quit, or they did the whole job and made a hash of it, or whatever.
1. It wouldn't make sense for me to expect them to fail or stop doing it or do it poorly just because it was free. Nor plan for them to fail.
2. Most people would still complain even though they paid nothing, and are arguably no worse off (depending on the options you pick) then when they started.
3. Most people would definitely feel like it was worse than doing nothing.
Now, in this example you could argue it's the poor quality/stopping halfway through that is causing this result, but you would IMHO see the same result even if they did a great job, but stopped after doing 90% of it, leaving me definitely no worse off, and probably much better off.
In the end, people's expectations are emotional and not simply rational.
It's fair in the singular case (IE if this is the only open source/free thing you use), but especially as you are dealing with more and more things like this (IE use lots of open source), it is totally irrational to expect them to plan for any of 50 open source projects they use to stop at any time.
It violates general good faith expectations. Just because someone is doing something for free doesn't mean you expect them to fail or stop - The cost is fairly orthogonal to most people's expectations. I don't expect any package in my linux distro to just stop existing or working at any time.
Sure, it would be sensible to plan for eventual failure of things you depend on, but it's not rational to expect people to plan for random failure of any of the things they depend on at any time, regardless of the cost of those things.
More to the point, it's not entitlement on their part to avoid sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time :)
The projects also often have the perspective of "it shouldn't be tha big a thing" but that's because they ignore they are not the only thing happening in their users world.
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.
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."
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.
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!)
Even as a paying customer on a $1m/yr contract, still using the open source distribution because AIStor is not something we are keen on, we were not informed whatsoever.
They were well aware we were still using those container images, and we were by far the only paying customers doing the same.
This is malicious.
> 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.
Not all shitty behavior is governed by contracts and licenses. You can be an asshole without violating the terms of a license.
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]
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But MinIO didn't do any of that. They're still a 100% open-source project, with the proper license.
Seems like the new definition of open source is not license, not code but What I need others must do for me
That has got to be the most fallacious analogy I've seen in a long time, and that's ignoring the fact that serving poop would get you in serious trouble in most jurisdictions. "False equivalence" barely covers it.
There is a basic social contract of not being an asshole to users of your product
Nope, nope...you win. Even more fallacious. Being an asshole to your users is a meme in OSS it's so common. Someone should tell that Linus guy about this 'social contract' he agreed to and signed that he's in violation of. /s
Claiming you support this philosophy, while acting against it, is hypocritical, and abusive towards people who do believe in it.
You think there's a philosophy. Some other people here do. There is no consistent OSS philosophy. There wasn't back when Stallman was thinking "what should I call this thing that is Not Unix" and there isn't today. If that was remotely true we'd still be happily using GPLv2. Because at the end of the day there is what is written in the license, and then there is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishful thinking results in nice things, and sometimes...well...here we are.
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.
Ignoring the laugh-out-loud silliness of "you should pick all these things about your startup day #1 and NEVER CHANGE THEM", exactly what terms of their OSS license did they violate? Be explicit. Don't wave your hand and say "but social contract that doesn't exist!", "but philosophy I made up and want to apply to people who didn't agree to it!". Because a license only means what's written down in it, not what we want it to mean. I get that you think there should be a "No assholes, we'll never, ever pivot to meet market changes and we pinky swear we won't rug pull on you" license that people should be forced to use, but I don't think to many people will sign up for it. See: GPLv2.
The open source baseline is still there, which is great, but if someone else was making these packages they'd be less likely to silently drop it.
Packages are deprecated and orphaned all the time, including in OSS package repos. It's often silent by virtue of the package maintainer just... ignoring it, until someone takes administrative action by just whacking the package.
> When it's a free option from a paid company, you get the worst of both worlds for risk of disappearing. And that's the situation here.
I don't really see that as having any impact. I also don't see a packing method for an active free project being deprecated as anything having "disappeared". People just need to update their deployment, just like if the release had included a breaking change.
Of course the entitlement to volunteer work is also rude, and in my opinion worse.
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."
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.
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?
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
True in theory but no one has infinite time to distinguish correctly between good feature requester or bad one.
There are not specific rules for every type of product in consumer law because that wouldn't be workable. Instead, you have to make your case in court, if it gets that far, that it doesn't meet that criteria. The judgements have to be made by squishy fallible humans, but it does happen; small claims courts rule on that sort of thing all the time. Your example would surely be found unsatisfactory.
So, yes, in the UK and other countries with a functioning political system, buying a product literally does buy you the right for satisfactory quality, and the right to get your money back if it isn't. That applies to everything from sandwiches to cars to email providers. (Again, that's only if you're a consumer. Protections are much weaker if you're purchasing as a business.)
I set a deliberately contrived example to illustrate why someone might be understandably upset when a service or product they've been enjoying degrades in quality, regardless of whether they paid for it or not, and the parallels that situation has with OSS rug pulls. Yet you've managed to make this about consumer protection laws, for some reason.
Since the conversation has derailed, and since I really don't have the patience to rehash everything I've already said in this thread, I'm out.
You can't complain that the neighbour who used to give you a handful of apples each day suddenly stops giving them to you, regardless of how dependent on them you've become. He did not "create an expectation", you did. He did not make you "dependent" on himself, you did.
It's a bit like someone pointed out a simple spelling mistake in your comment, so you rewrote your whole argument at them. Or even claimed that you had spelled it right after all!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure but maybe the changed their mind or just got burned out.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
And, reminder, they keep encouraging people to use the party as an important foundation for their own efforts.
Does that help explain why a sudden stop is causing harm to people that weren't being greedy? At which point anger is not an inherently bratty behavior.
This analogy has been tortured to within an inch of its life though.
People could keep using the old docker images while they trivially build their own.
If you want to make the example fit it’s more like “hey we’re still having the party but we aren’t gonna to put up any new decorations. If you want to put up the new decorations we left our garage open, but you have to do it yourself“.
That level of promise is what you get with 95% or more of products and services. It's not like you can avoid it.
I understand the impulse to say that these expectations are unreasonable so nobody should get mad. But when companies cultivate those expectations on purpose, it stops being unreasonable to get mad.
What do they do when a server is down?
>But when companies cultivate those expectations on purpose, it stops being unreasonable to get mad.
On the one hand I get that. But on the other hand, I see the exact same anger when it’s just some guy or a 2 person company that decides to stop doing some work for free.
If you limit your argument to it’s scummy for a company to offer something for free with the goal of creating a dependency that they can exploit by removing the free version and then offering a paid version, then I agree.
They can delay getting new versions for a few hours with no issue. But when they stop entirely it's a problem.
> On the one hand I get that. But on the other hand, I see the exact same anger when it’s just some guy or a 2 person company that decides to stop doing some work for free.
Well I'm not defending the anger in all cases. If it's that small they deserve a lot more slack. But they should still give a warning period and/or put in some effort to finding a new person from the community to put in charge.
> If you limit your argument to it’s scummy for a company to offer something for free with the goal of creating a dependency that they can exploit by removing the free version and then offering a paid version, then I agree.
Once the dependency exists, it's bad to cut it off without warning, even without an exploitative goal.
If they can delay getting a new version for a few hours they can delay getting a new version for a few months.
> Once the dependency exists, it's bad to cut it off without warning, even without an exploitative goal.
It would be nice for them to do that, and it’s fine to be disappointed if they don’t, but anger is uncalled for unless it was malicious.
But ignoring that, it isn’t like they are shutting of a live service without warning. They’re just no longer offering an image. You can keep using the images that you had saved indefinitely. A warning wasn’t necessary.