MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

With 100PB clusters being built and not a cent going to them, you can see why minio has gone this route. I wonder if they will be "valkeyed"? Not by AWS presumably.

> I wonder if they will be "valkeyed"? Not by AWS presumably

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.

That's a strange mindset, IMO. I'd be pissed if I had to pay $0.10 every time I turned a rachet, and it's weird to expect companies to have usage-based monetization on the tools they've made for others.

Let me introduce you to Splunk and enterprise software in general

did you buy the ratchet?

that's why you'd be pissed.

Nuantrix distributed a version that was still Apache licensed and merely failed to disclose they had made changes.

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.

If you were given the ratchet and then someone wanted to charge you every time you use it you would also be pissed.

That's the open source model. It's entirely predictable that if you provide software at no cost that is capable of running 100PB clusters, that some people will and you won't get paid, because those are the terms that you set.

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)

> showing that they extracted binaries from the distribution

Funnily enough, such action is outside of their paid product's EULA.

> If you were given the ratchet and then someone wanted to charge you every time you use it you would also 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.

> 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.

No one is saying people can't charge for their work though.

In this example the ratchet manufacturer would be giving them away for free though, and then get pissed when no one volunteers to pay.

No I wouldn’t, I would say “yeah that makes sense doesn’t it”

There are a few challenges with open-source projects that want to also be commercial entities.

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.

The problem then is that you're making a valuable tool and giving it away and then wandering around hat in hand. That's not going to work for anyone. Also, taking away things that you've already given people for free so that they have to pay you to get them back is not going to engender any goodwill.

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.

if people are giving away wrenches and not getting paid for that, they will quickly run out of wrenches, and they will learn. giving away something free does not inherently give them the right to charge for use of the wrench.

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.

If they charged a cent, would people adopt it in the first place?

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.

Wait until you find out how much compute is being run on Linux without a cent going to Linus.

That just means the fork would also need to be AGPL licensed, and the owner of the fork wouldn't be able to also sell a proprietary version with additional "enterprise" features. And IMO that would be a good thing.

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.

Conflating physical products and open source software doesn't usually make sense. The open source model is more like someone making a valuable tool for their own use and then agreeing to let other people copy the design and make their own version of it. Monetisation can come from various sources - you may be paid to make the tool in the first place or you may perform a job where that tool helps you (or whoever is paying you).

An analogy to making a physical tool doesn’t really work because we have to basically describe what software is in terms of exceptions to the analogy.

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.

I know this is anathema around here, but this is why I have always liked grant-funded open source work. Whether government or private, someone at a policy level decides that something is important, and pays for development, leading to a new public good.

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...

> The problem then is that you're making a valuable tool and giving it away and then wandering around hat in hand. That's not going to work for anyone.

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.

> 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!"

They don't consult lawyers. The CEO husband and wife team get really angry and fire off threatening letters, but I've never seen them consult a lawyer before sending a letter like that or accusing a company of violating a license publicly.

It’s the sort of behaviour that makes them relying on them even as a paying customer extremely risky.

oh you really butchered that metaphor.

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.

I don’t think that’s what they were going for. They said “ I'd be pissed if I had to pay $0.10 every time I turned a rachet” so the person turning the ratchet is the one paying. Who they pay to is unknown.