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672 points LexSiga | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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caymanjim ◴[] No.45674142[source]
I don't think this is really a big deal. Plenty of others already maintain public OCI images of Minio (Bitnami is one example). So long as that's the case, there are options. I'm not familiar with Minio's licensing terms, so maybe they can put an end to that practice if they want to, but I suspect there are drop-in replacements other than the official Minio Docker Hub image.

What Minio is doing wrong here is thinking too highly of themselves. Their product is a fine implementation of S3-compatible object storage. It has some features that make it attractive for selfhosting. It's far from the only solution, though. The harder they make it to use, the more people are going to switch to easier alternatives.

A lot of companies try to lock down their popular open source/free products once they have a large market share. It always backfires.

Hashicorp did this. There's no reason to use Terraform anymore; OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement that is just as good for almost everyone, and all the community support will shift to it such that it will inevitably be far superior to Terraform.

Redis became Valkey. MySQL became MariaDB. OwnCloud became Nextcloud.

There are countless examples. Yeah, the commercial entities continue to exist. For companies that need support and contracts, there will still be a market. But they are destroying their pipeline for new customers. Why would anyone use a closed commercial project with no community contribution when there's a free, open source option that's either a 100% compatible drop-in replacement or a low-effort pivot to a functionally-equivalent solution without vendor lock-in and burdensome restrictions?

Minio is shooting themselves in the foot. Most people don't give a crap what's backing their object storage, so long as it works.

replies(1): >>45675454 #
1. baobun ◴[] No.45675454[source]
> Plenty of others already maintain public OCI images of Minio (Bitnami is one example).

Looks like that's coming to an end too.

https://community.broadcom.com/tanzu/blogs/beltran-rueda-bor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45048419

replies(1): >>45675594 #
2. caymanjim ◴[] No.45675594[source]
Yeah, I saw that recently. linuxserver.io bundles a lot of apps into OCI images, and I use many of theirs because they tend to be better-designed than official ones—or at least more consistent.

And while some people might be intimidated by it, it's not a huge lift to make your own images. I don't mean to trivialize it, because it's at best inconvenient, and can be challenging. In many cases it's only a few minutes of work to bundle something up. LLMs are great at this. For a Golang app like Minio, it's a piece of cake, since you don't have to install a zillion dependencies manually.

replies(1): >>45678503 #
3. tzahifadida ◴[] No.45678503[source]
Really easy, I made a script to build bitnami images from a command line menu and push it to your dockerhub. It also detects changes in versions and you can rebuild and push again.

https://github.com/tzahifadida/oys-bitnami-builder