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MinIO stops distributing free Docker images

(github.com)
672 points LexSiga | 1 comments | 22 Oct 25 06:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mattbee ◴[22 Oct 25 10:53 UTC] No.45667259[source]▶
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.

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jamespo ◴[22 Oct 25 13:14 UTC] No.45668617[source]▶
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.
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nilamo ◴[22 Oct 25 13:23 UTC] No.45668757[source]▶
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.
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serf ◴[22 Oct 25 13:40 UTC] No.45669006[source]▶
did you buy the ratchet?

that's why you'd be pissed.

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protonbob ◴[22 Oct 25 14:32 UTC] No.45669718[source]▶
If you were given the ratchet and then someone wanted to charge you every time you use it you would also be pissed.
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palmotea ◴[22 Oct 25 15:20 UTC] No.45670513[source]▶
> 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.

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1. saltcured ◴[22 Oct 25 17:37 UTC] No.45672490[source]▶
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...