MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

I think both sides of this argument are correct:

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".

I agree with all the points you make. Just adding a detail to the following bit:

> 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.

People should understand from the outset that open source contributions from for-profit companies must benefit that company.

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.

I generally agree with your point. Over the years of being responsible for technology stack choices, I've come to apply one rule of thumb on OSS projects: is the project a core competency of the company behind it or not. For example, Github might open source their language detection library or Shopify might open source some frontend development project. These are not core competencies of Github or Shopify. Their business is somewhere else.

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.