MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

They abandoned documentation (edit: for the open source codebase) a couple of weeks ago - that seems more significant.

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.

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.

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)