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.
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)
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".
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.
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.
No one is saying people can't charge for their work though.
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!"
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...
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.
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.
Software on the other hand does not naturally wear out, in the same way physical objects do.
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.
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?
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.
https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs?tab=readme-ov-file#rustfs-v...
comparing RustFS to MinIO, including a claim about the MinIo support price.
- GarageFS
- OpenStack Swift
- CEPH Object Gateway Rados
- Riak CS
- OpenIOAnd indeed I noticed that OpenIO isn’t updated for quite some time.
[1] https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/460629937/our-blessed-homel...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.