MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

Is it an excuse? Maintaining code costs money, and the previous versions are provided under the license, and you're free to modify it, pull selective patches and maintain them yourself. While It'd be convenient if the license was a promise to develop and maintain features for free in perpetuity, it just isn't.

I run into this in non-company backed open source projects all the time too. Some maintainer gets burned out or non-interested and all they're rewarded is people with pitchforks because they thought there were some sort of obligations to provide free updates and suppport

It's different as a) they did offer it for free and b) have to maintain it for the closed version.

However, this is also a classic move, so shouldn't be unexpected behavior these days...

It is sort of an excuse. I don't use MinIO precisely because of this kind of behaviour - if I cannot easily develop, configure and test our applications, I'm not adopting it commercially, specially when there are a ton of options to choose from. In the end, this hurts the MinIO's enterprise offering. Having a robust, easy to deploy community edition, with predictable features, is a great way of allowing integrators to develop and test using your product, and to help the product to gain traction.

Conversely, if instead of making your users happy to pay you, you've made them happy to use your stuff for free, you own the consequences when you stop giving that stuff away.

Welcome to HN BTW, I see you were inspired to sign up and defend the project owner.

These are the same people who get mad at Red Hat because they think the 5K people who develop, maintain, and test all of the software do it for free