12 ms·

MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

511 points by hajtom 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
baq 11mo ago
please copy and paste outrage from previous discussions to not waste more time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665452
dardeaup 11mo ago
Hopefully no one is shocked or surprised.
- giancarlostoro 11mo ago
  I'm both shocked and not surprised. Lots of questions: Are they doing that bad from the outcry? Or are they just keeping a private version and going completely commercial only? If so, how do they bypass the AGPL in doing so, I assume they had contributions under the AGPL.
  - 0x073 11mo ago
    "For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see MinIO AIStor." Commercial only, they will replace the agpl contributions from external people. (Or at least they will say that)
    - Kerrick 11mo ago
      I don't understand. They've seen the contributions. How can they possibly do a clean-room implementation to avoid copyright infringement? (Let alone how tangled up in the history of the codebase they must be...)
      - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
        I hope some contributors get together and sue. ;)
      - tempest_ 11mo ago
        It doesnt matter unless someone takes them to court over it.
    - bogomipz 11mo ago
      It's worth noting their enterprise support is a joke. As is their whole pivot to "AI." Their pitch is that they are an AI company now. Good riddance. I look forward to a good community fork.
ecshafer 11mo ago
Is this just the open source portion? Minio is now a fully paid product then?
- margorczynski 11mo ago
  Basically officially killing off the open source version.
- 0x073 11mo ago
  "For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see MinIO AIStor." Probably yes.
radlad 11mo ago
Any good alternatives?
- pezgrande 11mo ago
  This one is usually the most recommended: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
- mlnj 11mo ago
  Have heard good things about Garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/). Am forced to use MinIO for certain products now but will eventually move to better eventually. Garage is high on my list of alternatives.
- itodd 11mo ago
  seaweedfs
- xrd 11mo ago
  I saw this referenced a few days ago. Haven't investigated it at all. https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ Edit: jeez, three of us all at once...
- ecshafer 11mo ago
  A lot of them actually. Ceph personally I've used. But there's a ton, some open source, some paid. Backblaze has a product Buckets or something. Dell powerscale. Cloudian has one. Nutanix has one.
  - coredog64 11mo ago
    I've been looking at microceph, but the requirement to run 3 OSDs on loopback files plus this comment from the docs gives me pause: `Be wary that an OSD, whether based on a physical device or a file, is resource intensive.` Can anyone quantify "resource intensive" here? Is it "takes an entire Raspberry Pi to run the minimum set" or is it "takes 4 cores per OSD"? Edit: This is the specific doc page https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/how-to/single-node/ https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/ho...
tiernano 11mo ago
Is this not the best thing that could happen? Like now its in maintenance, it can be forked without any potential license change in the future, or any new features that are in that license change... This allows anyone to continue working on this, right? Or did i miss something?
- Weryj 11mo ago
  Pretty sure you can’t retroactively apply a restrictive license, so that was never a concern.
  - IgorPartola 11mo ago
    You can, sort of, sometimes. Copyleft is still based on copyright. So in theory you can do a new license as long as all the copyright holders agree to the change. Take open source/free/copyleft out of it: You create a proprietary piece of software. You license it to Google and negotiate terms. You then negotiate different terms with Microsoft. Nothing so far prevents you from doing this. You can't yank the license from Google unless your contract allows that, but maybe it does. You can in theory then go and release it under a different license to the public. If that license is perpetual and non-revokable then presumably I can use it after you decide to stop offering that license. But if the license is non-transferrable then I can't pass on your software to someone else either by giving them a flash drive with it, or by releasing it under a different license. Several open source projects have been re-licensed. The main thing that really is the obstacle is that in a popular open source or copyleft project you have many contributors each of which holds the copyright to their patches. So now you have a mess of trying to relicense only some parts of your codebase and replace others for the people resisting the change or those you can't reach. It's a messy process. For example, check out how the Open Street Maps data got relicensed and what that took.
    - bilkow 11mo ago
      I think you are correct, but you probably misunderstood the parent. My understanding of what they meant by "retroactively apply a restrictive license" is to apply a restrictive license to previous commits that were already distributed using a FOSS license (the FOSS part being implied by the new license being "restrictive" and because these discussions are usually around license changes for previously FOSS projects such as Terraform). As allowing redistribution under at least the same license is usually a requirement for a license to be considered FOSS, you can't really change the license of an existing version as anyone who has acquired the version under the previous license can still redistribute it under the same terms. Edit: s/commit/version/, added "under the same terms" at the end, add that the new license being "restrictive" contributes to the implication that the previous license was FOSS
Havoc 11mo ago
I thought they were pivoting towards close it and trying to monetize this? That got backlash so now it’s just getting dropped entirely? People get to do whatever they want but bit jarring to go from this is worth something people will pay for to maintenance mode in quick succession
- ocdtrekkie 11mo ago
  They cite a proprietary alternative they offer for enterprises. So yes they pivoted to a monetized offering and are just dropping the open source one.
  - itopaloglu83 11mo ago
    So they’re pulling an OpenAI. Start open source to use free advertising and community programmer, and then dumps it all for commercial licensing. I think n8n is next because they finished the release candidate for version 2.0, but there are no changelogs.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > I thought they were pivoting towards close it and trying to monetize this? That's literally what the commit shows that they're doing? > *This project is currently under maintenance and is not accepting new changes.* > For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see MinIO SloppyAISlop (not actual name)
- this_user 11mo ago
  Their marketing had shifting to trying to push an AI angle for some time now. For an established project or company, that's usually a sign that things aren't going well.
theideaofcoffee 11mo ago
[flagged]
- nkmnz 11mo ago
  Downvoted because nobody knows how far a distance 39.5 feet is.
  - stronglikedan 11mo ago
    they do if they know the shoe size of the person who measured it
    - deathanatos 11mo ago
      It's a reference to a fairly widely known, and presently topical, song: Your brain is full of spiders You've got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch I wouldn't touch you with a 39 and a half foot pole!
bananapub 11mo ago
for those looking for a simple and reliable self hosted S3 thing, check out Garage . it's much simpler - no web ui, no fancy RS coding, no VC-backed AI company, just some french nerds making a very solid tool. fwiw while they do produce Docker containers for it, it's also extremely simple to run without that - it's a single binary and running it with systemd is unsurprisingly simple[1]. 0: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ 1: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/cookbook/systemd/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/cookbook/system...
- colesantiago 11mo ago
  How do you sustain yourselves while developing this project? What if the sponsorships run out?
  - prmoustache 11mo ago
    What if a company change license, drop the project or goes bankrupt? You shouldn't expect guarantee of any kind.
    - colesantiago 11mo ago
      > What if a company change license, drop the project or goes bankrupt? You can always fork the project, then the questions of sponsorships still remains. Recently Ghostty is a non profit, which means that it is guaranteed not to turn into a for profit and rugpull like what MinIO has done.
      - prmoustache 11mo ago
        That doesn't guarantee the devs stay motivated either. In the end open source allows motivated people to take over the project if you aren't willing to do it yourself but projects can also die of lack of motivated/paid resources.
snickell 11mo ago
Any efforts to consolidate around a community fork yet?
Dachande663 11mo ago
Does anyone have any recommendations for a simple S3-wrapper to a standard dir? I've got a few apps/services that can send data to S3 (or S3 compatible services) that I want to point to a local server I have, but they don't support SFTP or any of the more "primitive" solutions. I did use a python local-s3 thing, but it was... not good.
- mr-karan 11mo ago
  You could perhaps checkout https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
  - dardeaup 11mo ago
    I've done some preliminary testing with garage and I was pleasantly surprised. It worked as expected and didn't run into any gotchas.
    - digikata 11mo ago
      Garage is really good for core S3, the only thing I ran into was it didn't support object tagging. It could be considered maybe a more esoteric corner of the S3 api, but minio does support it. Especially if you're just mapping for a test api, object tagging is most likely an unneeded feature anyway. It's a "Misc" endpoint in the Garage docs here: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/reference-manual/s3-compatibility/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/reference-manua...
      - topspin 11mo ago
        "didn't support object tagging" Thanks for pointing that out.
- import 11mo ago
  rclone serve s3, could be.
  - 11mo ago
aranw 11mo ago
I've been using the minio-go client for S3-compatible storage abstraction in a project I'm working on. This new change putting the minio project into maintenance mode means no new features or bug fixes, which is concerning for something meant to be a stable abstraction layer Need to start reconsidering the approach now and looking for alternatives
frellus 11mo ago
https://aistore.nvidia.com https://aistore.nvidia.com
- positisop 11mo ago
  github.com/NVIDIA/aistore At the 1 billion valuation from the previous round, achieving a successful exit requires a company with deep pockets. Right now, Nvidia is probably a suitable buyer for MinIO, which might explain all the recent movements from them. Dell, Broadcom, NetApp, etc, are not going to buy them.
cantagi 11mo ago
They have been removing features from the open source version for a while. The closest alternative seems to be RustFS. Has anyone tried it? I was waiting until they support site replication before switching.
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  From what I looked still very fresh project, to the point running out of date minio version will most likely be less problematic than latest rustfs
- positisop 11mo ago
  If it is not an Apache/CNCF/LinuxFoundation project, it can be a rug pull aimed at using open source for getting people in the door only. They were never open for commits, and now they have abandoned open source altogether.
- rbartelme 11mo ago
  Might be coming soon based on this: https://docs.rustfs.com/features/replication/ https://docs.rustfs.com/features/replication/
- pankajdoharey 11mo ago
  Sad to see these same people were behind GlusterFS.
  - mbreese 11mo ago
    Well, maybe they are using that experience to build something better this time around? One can hope...
    - pankajdoharey 11mo ago
      Sure but trying to close source what has been opensource for a decade or trying to reduce features is very strange. I thought those people had higher standards.
- 11mo ago
candiddevmike 11mo ago
It sucks that S3 somehow became the defacto object storage interface, the API is terrible IMO. Too many headers, too many unknowns with support. WebDAV isn't any better, but I feel like we missed an opportunity here for a standardized interface.
- tlarkworthy 11mo ago
  ? Its like GET <namespace>/object, PUT <namespace>/object. To me its the most obvious mapping of HTTP to immutable object key value storage you could imagine. It is bad that the control plane responses can be malformed XML (e.g keys are not escaped right if you put XML control characters in object paths) but that can be forgiven as an oversight. Its not perfect but I don't think its a strange API at all.
  - candiddevmike 11mo ago
    Everything uses poorly documented, sometimes inconsistent HTTP headers that read like afterthoughts/tech debt. An S3 standard implementation has to have amazon branding all over it (x-amz) which is gross.
    - christina97 11mo ago
      I mean… it’s straight up an Amazon product, not like it’s an IETF standard or something.
    - drob518 11mo ago
      I suspect they learned a lot over the years and the API shows the scars. In their defense, they did go first.
  - perbu 11mo ago
    Last I checked the user guide to the API was 3500 pages. 3500 pages to describe upload and download, basically. That is pretty strange in my book.
    - 11mo ago
dbacar 11mo ago
Disgusting. Build a product, make it open-source to gain traction, and when you are done completely abandon it. Shame on me that I have put this ^%^$hit on a project and advocated it.
- stronglikedan 11mo ago
  That can happen to any project, hence why Plan B should be implemented right alongside Plan A whenever humanly possible.
uroni 11mo ago
I've been working on https://github.com/uroni/hs5 https://github.com/uroni/hs5 as a replacement with similar goals to early minio. The core is stable at this point, but the user/policy management and the web interface is still in the works.
- sph 11mo ago
  Good time to post a Show HN for your project then
- giancarlostoro 11mo ago
  Looks like you cleanly point out their violation of the AGPL. I wish I were a lawyer with nothing better to do, I'd definitely be suing the MinIO group, there's no way they can cleanly remove the AGPL code outsiders contributed.
  - bityard 11mo ago
    I don't see a contributor licensing agreement (CLA), so you may be right. (I personally choose not to contribute to projects with CLAs, I don't want my contributions to become closed-source in the future.)
    - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
      Its worse than I thought: https://blog.min.io/weka-violates-minios-open-source-licenses/ https://blog.min.io/weka-violates-minios-open-source-license... They think they can revoke someone's AGPL license. That's not at all how that license works!
      - kstrauser 11mo ago
        I think that's exactly how that license works. Basically, the license is the only thing that grants you rights to redistribute the licensed work. Copyright law otherwise forbids it. And the license itself only grants you the right to redistribute the work as long as you comply with its terms. If you violate them, the license no longer applies, and you no longer have any legal right to distribute the work or any derived works. I have zero knowledge about the squabble between MinIO and Weka. I don't know, and don't care, if either of them is in the right. But if Weka isn't complying with the terms of the AGPL, then MinIO has the legal right to tell them they can no longer distribute MinIO's licensed work at all, because nothing else grants them that privilege. If that weren't true, there'd be no teeth to the A?GPL whatsoever.
rowanseymour 11mo ago
What's the simplest replacement for mocking S3 in CI? We don't about performance or reliability.. it's just gotta act like S3.
- rodwyersoftware 11mo ago
  localstack, 100%
- onei 11mo ago
  I've used localstack in the past which worked pretty well. https://github.com/localstack/localstack https://github.com/localstack/localstack
Aurornis 11mo ago
> For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see [MinIO AIStor] Naming the product “AIStor” is one of the most blatant forced AI branding pivots I’ve seen.
- positisop 11mo ago
  Raising 100 mil at 1 B valuation and then trying for an exit is a bitch!
- evil-olive 11mo ago
  for maximum performance with MinIO AIStor, make sure to use one of Seagate's "AI hard drives": https://www.seagate.com/products/video-analytics/skyhawk-ai-hard-drive/ https://www.seagate.com/products/video-analytics/skyhawk-ai-...
- bityard 11mo ago
  And the naming conflicts with NVidia's AIStore (https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore). The two products are extremely similar. I don't know which came first, but Minio is going to want to do another pivot very soon if they want to survive. I doubt they have the resources to stand up to NVidia's army of extremely well-paid IP lawyers.
  - Natfan 11mo ago
    this is no different than grok vs groq imo. aistor and aistore are different names, even if they're pronounced similarly.
atemerev 11mo ago
How it makes sense? If they are no longer open-source S3 and cloud only, I'll just use S3.
zerofor_conduct 11mo ago
“The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.” ― Jean Renoir
st3fan 11mo ago
What a story. EOL the open source foundation of your commercial product, to which many people contributed, to turn it into a closed source "A-Ff*ing-I Store" .. seriously what the ...
- binsquare 11mo ago
  I still don't understand what the difference is. What is an AI Stor (e missing on purpose because that is how it is branded: https://www.min.io/product/aistor https://www.min.io/product/aistor)
  - bigbuppo 11mo ago
    About a billion dollars difference in valuation up until the bubble pops.
  - everfrustrated 11mo ago
    Might be because of this other storage product named that https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore
    - singhrac 11mo ago
      Does anyone use this? I was setting it up a few months ago but it felt very complicated compared to MinIO (or alternatives). Is there a sort of minikube-like tool I could use here?
      - 56kbr 11mo ago
        There's a development/playground deployment for local K8s (e.g. Minikube, KinD): https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore/tree/main/deploy/dev/k8s https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore/tree/main/deploy/dev/k8s. For production you'd need a proper cluster deployed via Helm, but for trying it out locally that setup is easy to get running.
  - paulddraper 11mo ago
    It can store things for AI workloads (and non-AI workloads, but who’s counting…)
Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
Like many smart people they focused on telling people the "how", and assume visitors to their wall of "AI"/hype text already understand the use-case "why". 1. I like that it is written in Go 2. I saw nothing above what Apache Spark+Hadoop with _consistent_ object stores already offers on Amazon (S3), Google Cloud (GCS), and or Microsoft (Azure Storage, ADLS Gen2) Best of luck, maybe folks should look around for that https://donate.apache.org/ https://donate.apache.org/ button before the tax year concludes =3
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  > I saw nothing above what Apache Spark+Hadoop with _consistent_ object stores already offers on Amazon (S3), Google Cloud (GCS), and or Microsoft (Azure Storage, ADLS Gen2) it was very simple to setup, and even if you just leased a bunch of servers off say OVH, far FAR cheaper to run your own than paying any of the big cloud providers. It also had pretty low requirements, ceph can do all that but setup is more complex and RAM requirements far, far higher
  - Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
    MinIO still makes no sense, as Ceph is fundamentally already RADOS at its core (fully compatible with S3 API.) For a proper Ceph setup, even the 45drives budget configuration is still not "hobby" grade. I will have to dive into the MinIO manual at some point, as the value proposition still seems like a mystery. Cheers =3
    - dardeaup 11mo ago
      "Ceph is fundamentally already RADOS at its core (fully compatible with S3 API.)" Yes, Ceph is RADOS at its core. However, RADOS != S3. Ceph provides an S3 compatible backend with the RADOS Gateway (RGW).
      - Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
        My point was even 45drives virtualization of Ceph host roles to squeeze the entire setup into a single box was not a "hobby" grade project. I don't understand yet exactly what MinIO would add on top of that to make it relevant at any scale. I'll peruse the manual on the weekend, because their main site was not helpful. Thanks for trying though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
deleted 11mo ago
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ibgeek 11mo ago
Time to fork and bring back removed features. :). An advantage of it being AGPL licensed.
jdoe1337halo 11mo ago
I use this image on my VPS, it was the last update before they neutered the community version quay.io/minio/minio:RELEASE.2025-04-22T22-12-26Z
- NietTim 11mo ago
  Same here, since I'm the only one using my instance. But, you should be aware that there is an CVE in that version that allows any account level to increase their own permissions to admin level, so it's inherently unsafe
- spapas82 11mo ago
  This is a way too old version. You should use a newer one instead by downloading the source and built the binaries yourself. Here's a simple script that does it automagically (you'll need golang installed): > build-minio-ver.sh #!/bin/bash set -e VERSION=$(git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/minio/minio.git | \ grep -Eo 'RELEASE\.[0-9T-]+Z' | sort | tail -n1) echo "Building MinIO $VERSION ..." rm -rf /tmp/minio-build git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/minio/minio.git /tmp/minio-build cd /tmp/minio-build git fetch --tags git checkout "$VERSION" echo "Building minio..." CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath \ -ldflags "-s -w \ -X github.com/minio/minio/cmd.Version=$VERSION \ -X github.com/minio/minio/cmd.ReleaseTag=$VERSION \ -X github.com/minio/minio/cmd.CommitID=$(git rev-parse HEAD)" \ -o "$OLDPWD/minio" echo " Binary created at: $(realpath "$OLDPWD/minio")" "$OLDPWD/minio" --version
positisop 11mo ago
Raising 100 mil at 1 B valuation and then trying for an exit is a bitch!
aftbit 11mo ago
Shocker... they abandoned POSIX compatibility, built a massively over-complicated product, then failed to compete with things like Ceph on the metal side or ubiquitous S3/R2/B2 on the cloud side.
- throwaway894345 11mo ago
  > they abandoned POSIX compatibility, built a massively over-complicated product This is a wild sentence--how can you criticize them for abandoning POSIX support __and__ building a massively over-complicated product? Making a reliable POSIX system is inherently very complex.
  - deleted 11mo ago
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  - bee_rider 11mo ago
    I think the criticism (just interpreting the post, don’t know anything about the technical situation) is that the complication is not necessary/worthwhile. POSIX can be complicated, but it puts you in a nice ecosystem, so for some use-cases complex POSIX support is not over complicated. It is just… appropriately complicated.
    - throwaway894345 11mo ago
      Sure, but then you can make that argument about any of the features in Minio, in which case the parent's argument about Minio as a whole being overcomplicated is invalidated. Probably the more sensible way to look at things is "value / complexity" or "bang for buck", but even there I think POSIX loses since it's relatively little value for a relatively large amount of complexity.
      - bee_rider 11mo ago
bouk 11mo ago
big L for all the cloud providers that made the mistake of using it instead of forging their own path, they're kind of screwed now
- tehjoker 11mo ago
  How are they screwed if they can adopt the source and continue patching it? Writing their own would incur a greater cost.
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cies 11mo ago
I use Supabase Storage. It does S3-style signed download links (so I can switch to any S3 service if I like later).
adriatp 11mo ago
I had a minio server in my homelab and I have to replace it after the 15v because they capped almost all settings. So sad...
thway15269037 11mo ago
So, when anyone will fork in? Call it MaxIO or whatever. I might even submit couple of small patches. My only blocker for a fork to maintain compatibility and path to upgrade from earlier versions.
- 12_throw_away 11mo ago
  To be fair, their previous behavior and attitude towards the open source license suggests that minio would possibly engage in at least a little bumptious legal posturing against whoever chose to fork it.
spapas82 11mo ago
Minio is more or less feature complete for most use cases. Actually the last big update of minio removed features (the UI). I am using minio for 5 years and haven't messed with it or used any new thingie for the last 5 years (i.e since I installed it); I only update to new versions. So if the minio maintainers (or anybody that forks the project and wants to work it) can fix any security issues that may occur I don't see any problems with using it.
- cromka 11mo ago
  > Actually the last big update of minio removed features (the UI) AFIK they removed it only to move it to their paid version, didn't they?
  - lionkor 11mo ago
    yes
  - spapas82 11mo ago
    Well I didn't mind when they removed it and certainly I didn't consider their paid version which is way too expensive for most use cases. The UI was useful when first configuring the buckets and permissions; if you've got it working (and don't need to change anything) you're good to go. Also, everything can be configured without the UI (not so easily of course).
- fithisux 11mo ago
  I used it for my experiments in Docker. I once or two used the UI, I always connected through python.
- deeebug 11mo ago
  > So if the minio maintainers (or anybody that forks the project and wants to work it) can fix any security issues that may occur I don't see any problems with using it. The concerning language for me is this part that was added: > Critical security fixes may be evaluated on a case-by-case basis It seems to imply that any fixes _may_ be merged in, but there's no guarantees.
souenzzo 11mo ago
The best software is the one that doesn't change.
liviux 11mo ago
Fork in Linux foundation incoming. Minio will revert in 1-2 years, but too late, community will move on and never return, reputation lost forever
- phoronixrly 11mo ago
  Just watch them harass fork users with proprietary stacks as they used to: https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13308#issuecomment-929254690 https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13308#issuecomment-929... https://github.com/minio/minio/discussions/13571#discussioncomment-1583482 https://github.com/minio/minio/discussions/13571#discussionc...
  - speedgoose 11mo ago
    Oh no, I used MinIO once or twice for some unlicensed software. Should I contact a MinIO salesman to purchase an enterprise license ASAP or is it fine if I license my kids and advent of code solutions under the AGPLv3 license ?
  - orphea 11mo ago
    > you may be violating AGPLv3 if you are using MinIO to build commercial products or using it for commercial purposes Yeah, this is bullshit. I wish the guy used his own advise and spoke to a lawyer :)
  - ahepp 11mo ago
    Wait, what's the consensus on this? Are they saying that using object storage over a standard network API which they didn't even create, makes your application a derivative work of the object store? Or just that the users would need to make minio sources, including modifications, freely available? I guess that's kind of the big question inherent to the AGPL?
    - tetha 11mo ago
      From my understanding, you would not be allowed to sell an "S3 compatible storage" as a service based off of Minio or another AGPL licensed S3-compatible storage solution, especially if you modify the source code of minio in any way and then serve that to your customers. If you use Minio or another AGPL licensed service internally to support your own product without a customer ever touching it's API, it should be fine.
gethly 11mo ago
There is https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs I haver not used it but will be likely a good minio alternative for people who want to run a server and don't use minio just as s3 client.
- lima 11mo ago
  Is it stable now? Last time I checked, the amount of correctness bugs being fixed in the Git history wasn't very confidence-inspiring.
  - yahooguntu 11mo ago
    We're in the process of moving to it, and it does seem to have a lot of small bugfixes flying around, but the maintainer is EXTREMELY responsive. I think we'll just end up doing a bit of testing before upgrading to newer versions. For our use case (3 nodes, 61TB of NVMe) it seems like the best option out of what I looked at (GarageFS, JuiceFS, Ceph). If we had 5+ nodes I'd probably have gone with Ceph though.
  - rednb 11mo ago
    Since storage is a critical component, I closely watched it and engaged with the project for about 2 years circa as i contemplated adding it to our project, but the project is still immature from a reliability perspective in my opinion. No test suite, plenty of regressions, and data loss bugs on core code paths that should have been battled tested after so many years. There are many moving parts, which is both its strength and its weakness as anything can break - and does break. Even Erasure Coding/Decoding has had problems, but a guy from Proton has contributed a lot of fixes in this area lately. One of the big positive in my opinion, is the maintainer. He is an extremely friendly and responsive gentleman. Seaweedfs is also the most lightweight storage system you can find, and it is extremely easy to set up, and can run on servers with very little hardware resources. Many people are happy with it, but you'd better be ready to understand their file format to fix corruption issues by hand. As far as i am concerned, i realized that after watching all these bugs, the idea of using seaweedfs was causing me more anxiety than peace of mind. Since we didn't need to store billions of files yet, not even millions, we went with creating a file storage API in ASP.NET Core in 1 or 2 hours, hosted on a VPS, that we can replicate using rsync without problem. Since i made this decision, i have peace of mind and no longer think about my storage system. Simplicity is often better, and OSes have long been optimized to cache and serve files natively. If you are not interested in contributing fixes and digging into the file format when a problem occurs, and if your data is important to you, unless you operate at the billions of files scalability tier Seaweedfs shines at, i'd suggest rolling your own boring storage system.
killme2008 11mo ago
I can't believe they made this decision. It's detrimental to the open-source ecosystem and MinIO users, and it's not good for them either, just look at the Elasticsearch case.
apexalpha 11mo ago
So how are HN reviews of GarageHQ? Or any others?
- speedgoose 11mo ago
  I havn't tested it since a while, but it was pretty good and a lot simpler than MinIO. Like in the old MinIO days, an S3 object is a file on the filesystem, not some replicated blocks. You could always rebuild the full object store content with a few rsync. I appreciate the simplicity. My main concern was that you couldn't configure it easily through files, you had to use CLI, which wasn't very convenient. I hope this has changed.
  - realreality 11mo ago
    Objects in Garage are broken up into 1MB (default) blocks, and compressed with zstandard. So, it would be difficult to reconstruct the files. I don't know if that was a recent change since you looked at it. Configuration is still through the CLI, though it's fairly simple. If your usecase is similar to the way that the Deuxfleurs organization uses it -- several heterogeneous, geographically distributed nodes that are more or less set-it-and-forget-it -- then it's probably a good fit.
    - speedgoose 11mo ago
      I guess this change was inevitable. But I like the possibility to reconstruct a broken distributed file storage system. GlusterFS also allowed this. My use case is relatively common : I want small S3 compatible object stores that can be deployed in Kubernetes without manual intervention. The CLI part was a bit in the way last time, this could have been automated but it wasn't straightforward.
- realreality 11mo ago
  Garage works well for its limited feature set, but it doesn't have very active development. Apparently they're working on a management UI. Seaweedfs is more mature and has many interfaces (S3, webdav, SFTP, REST, fuse mount). It's most appropriate for storing lots of small files. I prefer the command line interface and data/synchronization model of Garage, though. It's easier to manage, probably because the developers aren't biting off more than they can chew.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
nazcan 11mo ago
I'm quite interested in a k8s-native file-system that makes use of local persistent volumes. I'm running cockroachDB in my cluster (not yet with local persistent volumes.. but getting closer). Anyone have any suggestions?
Eikon 11mo ago
I've been using Minio in ZeroFS' [0] CI (a POSIX compliant filesystem that works on top of s3). I guess I'll switch to MicroCeph [1]. [0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS [1] https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/ https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/
- ahepp 11mo ago
  What is the use case for implementing a POSIX filesystem on top of an object store? I remember reading this article a few years ago, which happens to be by the minio folks: https://blog.min.io/filesystem-on-object-store-is-a-bad-idea/ https://blog.min.io/filesystem-on-object-store-is-a-bad-idea...
  - Eikon 11mo ago
    > What is the use case for implementing a POSIX filesystem on top of an object store? The use case is fully stateless infrastructure: your file/database servers become disposable and interchangeable (no "pets"), because all state lives in S3. This dramatically simplifies operations, scaling, and disaster recovery, and it's cheap since S3 (or at least, S3 compatible services) storage costs are very low. The MinIO article's criticisms don't really apply here because ZeroFS doesn't store files 1:1 to S3. It uses an LSM-tree database backed by S3, which allows it to implement proper POSIX semantics with actual performance.
    - ahepp 11mo ago
      It makes sense that some of the criticisms wouldn't apply if you're not storing the files 1:1. What about NFS or traditional filesystems on iSCSI block devices? I assume you're not using those because managing/scaling/HA for them is too painful? What about the openstack equivalents of EFS/EBS? Or Ceph's fs/blockdev solutions (although looking into it a bit, it seems like those are based on its object store)?
vanschelven 11mo ago
Is there a good overview of recent Open Source Rugpulls in the vein of killedbygoogle.com somewhere?
ncrmro 11mo ago
As a note ceph (rook on kubernetes) which is distributed blockstorage has a built in s3 endpoint support
valyala 11mo ago
What is the purpose of MinIO, Seaweedfs and similar object storage systems? They lack durability guarantees provided by S3 and GCS. They lack "infinite" storage promise contrary to S3 and GCS. They lack "infinite" bandwidth unlike S3 and GCS. They are more expensive than other storage options, unlike S3 and GCS.
- onionisafruit 11mo ago
  I haven't used it in a while, but it used to be great as a test double for s3
- maartin0 11mo ago
  It's great for a prototype which doesn't need to store a huge amount of data, you can run it on the same VM as a node server behind Cloudflare and get a fairly reliable setup going
- cortesoft 11mo ago
  We use it because we are already running our own k8s clusters in our datacenters, and we have large storage requirements for tools that have native S3 integration, and running our own minio clusters in the same datacenter as the tools that generate and consume that data is a lot faster and cheaper than using S3. For example, we were running a 20 node k8s cluster for our Cortex (distributed Prometheus) install, monitoring about 30k servers around the world, and it was generating a bit over a TB of data a day. It was a lot more cost effective and performant to create a minio cluster for that data than to use S3. Also, you can get durability with minio with multi cluster replication.
  - valyala 11mo ago
    Consider migrating to VictoriaMetrics and saving on storage costs and operations costs. You also won't need MinIO, since it stores data to local filesystem (aka to regular persistent volumes). See real-world reports from happy users who saved costs on a large-scale Prometheus-compatible monitoring - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/casestudies/ https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/casestudies...
paulddraper 11mo ago
Open source is not a sustainable business model. There are two ways open source projects continue. 1. The creator has a real, solid way to make money (React by Facebook, Go by Google). 2. The project is extremely popular (Linux, PostreSQL). Is it possible for people to reliably keep working for ~free? In theory yes, but if you expect that, you have a very bad understanding of 98% of human behavior.
- conqrr 11mo ago
  They are making lot of enterpise bucks though. And they did start as Open Source. Killing it midway to serve their convenience is the issue. There's also tonne of Open Source that isn't as popular but serving niche communities. It's definitely harder but not impossible. OS core and paid hosting with bells and whistles has proven to be a good sustainable model.
  - paulddraper 11mo ago
    > OS core and paid hosting with bells and whistles has proven to be a good sustainable model Redis, Elasticsearch, Terraform, MongoDB, CockroachDB have all changed their OSS licenses in recent years.
- mschuster91 11mo ago
  There's actually three ways, the third one being academia picking up the bill which is how we got the mess that is OpenStack. Also, Debian has been around for a few decades, although I do admit that - like the Linux kernel - that wouldn't have been possible without a lot of companies contributing back to the ecosystem.
0x1ch 11mo ago
> Kill open source features. > Gaslight community when rightfully annoyed > Kill off primary product > Offer same product with AI slapped on the name to enterprise customers. Good riddance Minio, and goodbye!
spicymaki 11mo ago
Stallman was right. When will the developer community learn not to contribute to these projects with awful CLAs. The rug has been pulled.
- pabs3 11mo ago
  MinIO doesn't seem to have had a CLA though?
  - EgoIncarnate 11mo ago
    MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
    - woooooo 11mo ago
      Isn't that standard protective boilerplate so that they cant get rugpulled themselves on a contribution, 2 years later? I thought the ASF had something similar.
      - EgoIncarnate 11mo ago
        Requiring AGPL on the contribution would also prevent a rugpull. MinIO went beyond that. The wording gives an Apache license only to MinIO, not to people who use it. So MinIO can relicense the the contributor code under a commercially viable license, but no one else can. Everyone else will only have access to the contribution under AGPL as part of the whole project.
        woooooo 11mo ago
        Ah I didnt realize there were 2 different licenses at play, yeah that's a little sus.
hintymad 11mo ago
I suspect that Clickhouse will go down the same path. They already changed their roadmap a bit two years ago[1], and had good reasons: if the open sourced version does too well, it will compete with their cloud business. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608186
victormy 11mo ago
Big thanks to MinIO, RustFS, and Garage for their contributions. That said, MinIO closing the door on open source so abruptly definitely spooked the community. But honestly, fair play to them—open source projects eventually need a path to monetization. I’ve evaluated both RustFS and Garage, and here’s the breakdown: Release Cadence: Garage feels a bit slower, while RustFS is shipping updates almost weekly. Licensing: Garage is on AGPLv3, but RustFS uses the Apache license (which is huge for enterprise adoption). Stability: Garage currently has the edge in distributed environments. With MinIO effectively bowing out of the OSS race, my money is on RustFS to take the lead.
- ahepp 11mo ago
  > open source projects eventually need a path to monetization I guess I'm curious if I'm understanding what you mean here, because it seems like there's a huge number of counterexamples. GNU coreutils. The linux kernel. FreeBSD. NFS and iSCSI drivers for either of those kernels. Cgroups in the Linux kernel. If anything, it seems strange to expect to be able to monetize free-as-in-freedom software. GNU freedom number 0 is "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose". I don't see anything in there about "except for business purposes", or anything in there about "except for businesses I think can afford to pay me". It seems like a lot of these "open core" cloud companies just have a fundamental misunderstanding about what free software is. Which isn't to say I have anything against people choosing to monetize their software. I couldn't afford to give all my work away for free, which is why I don't do that. However, I don't feel a lot of sympathy to people who surely use tons of actual libre software without paying for it, when someone uses their libre software without paying.
  - mikestorrent 11mo ago
    I think, if anything, in this age of AI coding we should see a resurgence in true open-source projects where people are writing code how they feel like writing it and tossing it out into the world. The quality will be a mixed bag! and that's okay. No warranty expressed or implied. As the quality rises and the cost of AI coding drops - and it will, this phase of $500/mo for Cursor is not going to last - I think we'll see plenty more open source projects that embody the spirit you're talking about. The trick here is that people may not want to be coding MinIO. It's like... just not that fun of a thing to work on, compared to something more visible, more elevator-pitchy, more sexy. You spend all your spare time donating your labour to a project that... serves files? I the lowly devops bow before you and thank you for your beautiful contribution, but I the person meeting you at a party wonder why you do this in particular with your spare time instead of, well, so many other things. I've never understood it, but then, that's why I'm not a famous open-source dev, right?
ta9000 11mo ago
[dead]
pabs3 11mo ago
Anyone know if MinIO AIStor is legal? AFAICT MinIO didn't have a CLA and there are 559 non-@minio.io commit authors in the git history, which could be an AGPL violation if they didn't get contributor approval for the license change. Or is AIStor a fresh codebase written from scratch? Edit: some discussion of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136871
- EgoIncarnate 11mo ago
  MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
lynn_xx 11mo ago
MinIO is a great open-source project. I’m familiar with it because I previously worked with Longhorn. But for any project to sustain long-term development, it needs a viable business model to support ongoing investment and growth.
jsiepkes 11mo ago
There is also Ambry ( https://github.com/linkedin/ambry https://github.com/linkedin/ambry ) as an alternative. The blob store open-sourced, created and maintained by LinkedIn. It also has an S3 compatible interface. I think it is about 10 years old now and it is really stable.
createaccount99 11mo ago
So why exactly did they close source, what were they losing by having AGPL? I thought AGPL + selling private licenses to corps was a fantastic method of getting some income for an open source offering.
- rzerowan 11mo ago
  The moves they have been making seem to be similar to what one would see if the VC money was getting tight or alternatively they were bought out by a Private Equity firm. Similar to the way Broadcom did with VMware hiking prices astronomically for their largest clients, and basically killing the SME offering.

511 points by hajtom 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

baq 11mo ago

please copy and paste outrage from previous discussions to not waste more time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665452

dardeaup 11mo ago

Hopefully no one is shocked or surprised.

giancarlostoro 11mo ago
I'm both shocked and not surprised. Lots of questions: Are they doing that bad from the outcry? Or are they just keeping a private version and going completely commercial only? If so, how do they bypass the AGPL in doing so, I assume they had contributions under the AGPL.
- 0x073 11mo ago
  "For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see MinIO AIStor." Commercial only, they will replace the agpl contributions from external people. (Or at least they will say that)
  - Kerrick 11mo ago
    I don't understand. They've seen the contributions. How can they possibly do a clean-room implementation to avoid copyright infringement? (Let alone how tangled up in the history of the codebase they must be...)
    - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
      I hope some contributors get together and sue. ;)
    - tempest_ 11mo ago
      It doesnt matter unless someone takes them to court over it.
  - bogomipz 11mo ago
    It's worth noting their enterprise support is a joke. As is their whole pivot to "AI." Their pitch is that they are an AI company now. Good riddance. I look forward to a good community fork.

ecshafer 11mo ago

Is this just the open source portion? Minio is now a fully paid product then?

margorczynski 11mo ago
Basically officially killing off the open source version.
0x073 11mo ago
"For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see MinIO AIStor." Probably yes.

radlad 11mo ago

Any good alternatives?

pezgrande 11mo ago
This one is usually the most recommended: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
mlnj 11mo ago
Have heard good things about Garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/). Am forced to use MinIO for certain products now but will eventually move to better eventually. Garage is high on my list of alternatives.
itodd 11mo ago
seaweedfs
xrd 11mo ago
I saw this referenced a few days ago. Haven't investigated it at all. https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ Edit: jeez, three of us all at once...
ecshafer 11mo ago
A lot of them actually. Ceph personally I've used. But there's a ton, some open source, some paid. Backblaze has a product Buckets or something. Dell powerscale. Cloudian has one. Nutanix has one.
- coredog64 11mo ago
  I've been looking at microceph, but the requirement to run 3 OSDs on loopback files plus this comment from the docs gives me pause: `Be wary that an OSD, whether based on a physical device or a file, is resource intensive.` Can anyone quantify "resource intensive" here? Is it "takes an entire Raspberry Pi to run the minimum set" or is it "takes 4 cores per OSD"? Edit: This is the specific doc page https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/how-to/single-node/ https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/ho...

tiernano 11mo ago

Is this not the best thing that could happen? Like now its in maintenance, it can be forked without any potential license change in the future, or any new features that are in that license change... This allows anyone to continue working on this, right? Or did i miss something?

Weryj 11mo ago
Pretty sure you can’t retroactively apply a restrictive license, so that was never a concern.
- IgorPartola 11mo ago
  You can, sort of, sometimes. Copyleft is still based on copyright. So in theory you can do a new license as long as all the copyright holders agree to the change. Take open source/free/copyleft out of it: You create a proprietary piece of software. You license it to Google and negotiate terms. You then negotiate different terms with Microsoft. Nothing so far prevents you from doing this. You can't yank the license from Google unless your contract allows that, but maybe it does. You can in theory then go and release it under a different license to the public. If that license is perpetual and non-revokable then presumably I can use it after you decide to stop offering that license. But if the license is non-transferrable then I can't pass on your software to someone else either by giving them a flash drive with it, or by releasing it under a different license. Several open source projects have been re-licensed. The main thing that really is the obstacle is that in a popular open source or copyleft project you have many contributors each of which holds the copyright to their patches. So now you have a mess of trying to relicense only some parts of your codebase and replace others for the people resisting the change or those you can't reach. It's a messy process. For example, check out how the Open Street Maps data got relicensed and what that took.
  - bilkow 11mo ago
    I think you are correct, but you probably misunderstood the parent. My understanding of what they meant by "retroactively apply a restrictive license" is to apply a restrictive license to previous commits that were already distributed using a FOSS license (the FOSS part being implied by the new license being "restrictive" and because these discussions are usually around license changes for previously FOSS projects such as Terraform). As allowing redistribution under at least the same license is usually a requirement for a license to be considered FOSS, you can't really change the license of an existing version as anyone who has acquired the version under the previous license can still redistribute it under the same terms. Edit: s/commit/version/, added "under the same terms" at the end, add that the new license being "restrictive" contributes to the implication that the previous license was FOSS

Havoc 11mo ago

I thought they were pivoting towards close it and trying to monetize this? That got backlash so now it’s just getting dropped entirely? People get to do whatever they want but bit jarring to go from this is worth something people will pay for to maintenance mode in quick succession

ocdtrekkie 11mo ago
They cite a proprietary alternative they offer for enterprises. So yes they pivoted to a monetized offering and are just dropping the open source one.
- itopaloglu83 11mo ago
  So they’re pulling an OpenAI. Start open source to use free advertising and community programmer, and then dumps it all for commercial licensing. I think n8n is next because they finished the release candidate for version 2.0, but there are no changelogs.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
> I thought they were pivoting towards close it and trying to monetize this? That's literally what the commit shows that they're doing? > *This project is currently under maintenance and is not accepting new changes.* > For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see MinIO SloppyAISlop (not actual name)
this_user 11mo ago
Their marketing had shifting to trying to push an AI angle for some time now. For an established project or company, that's usually a sign that things aren't going well.

theideaofcoffee 11mo ago

[flagged]

nkmnz 11mo ago
Downvoted because nobody knows how far a distance 39.5 feet is.
- stronglikedan 11mo ago
  they do if they know the shoe size of the person who measured it
  - deathanatos 11mo ago
    It's a reference to a fairly widely known, and presently topical, song: Your brain is full of spiders You've got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch I wouldn't touch you with a 39 and a half foot pole!

bananapub 11mo ago

for those looking for a simple and reliable self hosted S3 thing, check out Garage . it's much simpler - no web ui, no fancy RS coding, no VC-backed AI company, just some french nerds making a very solid tool. fwiw while they do produce Docker containers for it, it's also extremely simple to run without that - it's a single binary and running it with systemd is unsurprisingly simple[1]. 0: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ 1: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/cookbook/systemd/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/cookbook/system...

colesantiago 11mo ago
How do you sustain yourselves while developing this project? What if the sponsorships run out?
- prmoustache 11mo ago
  What if a company change license, drop the project or goes bankrupt? You shouldn't expect guarantee of any kind.
  - colesantiago 11mo ago
    > What if a company change license, drop the project or goes bankrupt? You can always fork the project, then the questions of sponsorships still remains. Recently Ghostty is a non profit, which means that it is guaranteed not to turn into a for profit and rugpull like what MinIO has done.
    - prmoustache 11mo ago
      That doesn't guarantee the devs stay motivated either. In the end open source allows motivated people to take over the project if you aren't willing to do it yourself but projects can also die of lack of motivated/paid resources.

snickell 11mo ago

Any efforts to consolidate around a community fork yet?

Dachande663 11mo ago

Does anyone have any recommendations for a simple S3-wrapper to a standard dir? I've got a few apps/services that can send data to S3 (or S3 compatible services) that I want to point to a local server I have, but they don't support SFTP or any of the more "primitive" solutions. I did use a python local-s3 thing, but it was... not good.

mr-karan 11mo ago
You could perhaps checkout https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/
- dardeaup 11mo ago
  I've done some preliminary testing with garage and I was pleasantly surprised. It worked as expected and didn't run into any gotchas.
  - digikata 11mo ago
    Garage is really good for core S3, the only thing I ran into was it didn't support object tagging. It could be considered maybe a more esoteric corner of the S3 api, but minio does support it. Especially if you're just mapping for a test api, object tagging is most likely an unneeded feature anyway. It's a "Misc" endpoint in the Garage docs here: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/reference-manual/s3-compatibility/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/reference-manua...
    - topspin 11mo ago
      "didn't support object tagging" Thanks for pointing that out.
import 11mo ago
rclone serve s3, could be.
- 11mo ago

aranw 11mo ago

I've been using the minio-go client for S3-compatible storage abstraction in a project I'm working on. This new change putting the minio project into maintenance mode means no new features or bug fixes, which is concerning for something meant to be a stable abstraction layer Need to start reconsidering the approach now and looking for alternatives

frellus 11mo ago

https://aistore.nvidia.com https://aistore.nvidia.com

positisop 11mo ago
github.com/NVIDIA/aistore At the 1 billion valuation from the previous round, achieving a successful exit requires a company with deep pockets. Right now, Nvidia is probably a suitable buyer for MinIO, which might explain all the recent movements from them. Dell, Broadcom, NetApp, etc, are not going to buy them.

cantagi 11mo ago

They have been removing features from the open source version for a while. The closest alternative seems to be RustFS. Has anyone tried it? I was waiting until they support site replication before switching.

PunchyHamster 11mo ago
From what I looked still very fresh project, to the point running out of date minio version will most likely be less problematic than latest rustfs
positisop 11mo ago
If it is not an Apache/CNCF/LinuxFoundation project, it can be a rug pull aimed at using open source for getting people in the door only. They were never open for commits, and now they have abandoned open source altogether.
rbartelme 11mo ago
Might be coming soon based on this: https://docs.rustfs.com/features/replication/ https://docs.rustfs.com/features/replication/
pankajdoharey 11mo ago
Sad to see these same people were behind GlusterFS.
- mbreese 11mo ago
  Well, maybe they are using that experience to build something better this time around? One can hope...
  - pankajdoharey 11mo ago
    Sure but trying to close source what has been opensource for a decade or trying to reduce features is very strange. I thought those people had higher standards.
11mo ago

candiddevmike 11mo ago

It sucks that S3 somehow became the defacto object storage interface, the API is terrible IMO. Too many headers, too many unknowns with support. WebDAV isn't any better, but I feel like we missed an opportunity here for a standardized interface.

tlarkworthy 11mo ago
? Its like GET <namespace>/object, PUT <namespace>/object. To me its the most obvious mapping of HTTP to immutable object key value storage you could imagine. It is bad that the control plane responses can be malformed XML (e.g keys are not escaped right if you put XML control characters in object paths) but that can be forgiven as an oversight. Its not perfect but I don't think its a strange API at all.
- candiddevmike 11mo ago
  Everything uses poorly documented, sometimes inconsistent HTTP headers that read like afterthoughts/tech debt. An S3 standard implementation has to have amazon branding all over it (x-amz) which is gross.
  - christina97 11mo ago
    I mean… it’s straight up an Amazon product, not like it’s an IETF standard or something.
  - drob518 11mo ago
    I suspect they learned a lot over the years and the API shows the scars. In their defense, they did go first.
- perbu 11mo ago
  Last I checked the user guide to the API was 3500 pages. 3500 pages to describe upload and download, basically. That is pretty strange in my book.
  - 11mo ago

dbacar 11mo ago

Disgusting. Build a product, make it open-source to gain traction, and when you are done completely abandon it. Shame on me that I have put this ^%^$hit on a project and advocated it.

stronglikedan 11mo ago
That can happen to any project, hence why Plan B should be implemented right alongside Plan A whenever humanly possible.

uroni 11mo ago

I've been working on https://github.com/uroni/hs5 https://github.com/uroni/hs5 as a replacement with similar goals to early minio. The core is stable at this point, but the user/policy management and the web interface is still in the works.

sph 11mo ago
Good time to post a Show HN for your project then
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
Looks like you cleanly point out their violation of the AGPL. I wish I were a lawyer with nothing better to do, I'd definitely be suing the MinIO group, there's no way they can cleanly remove the AGPL code outsiders contributed.
- bityard 11mo ago
  I don't see a contributor licensing agreement (CLA), so you may be right. (I personally choose not to contribute to projects with CLAs, I don't want my contributions to become closed-source in the future.)
  - giancarlostoro 11mo ago
    Its worse than I thought: https://blog.min.io/weka-violates-minios-open-source-licenses/ https://blog.min.io/weka-violates-minios-open-source-license... They think they can revoke someone's AGPL license. That's not at all how that license works!
    - kstrauser 11mo ago
      I think that's exactly how that license works. Basically, the license is the only thing that grants you rights to redistribute the licensed work. Copyright law otherwise forbids it. And the license itself only grants you the right to redistribute the work as long as you comply with its terms. If you violate them, the license no longer applies, and you no longer have any legal right to distribute the work or any derived works. I have zero knowledge about the squabble between MinIO and Weka. I don't know, and don't care, if either of them is in the right. But if Weka isn't complying with the terms of the AGPL, then MinIO has the legal right to tell them they can no longer distribute MinIO's licensed work at all, because nothing else grants them that privilege. If that weren't true, there'd be no teeth to the A?GPL whatsoever.

rowanseymour 11mo ago

What's the simplest replacement for mocking S3 in CI? We don't about performance or reliability.. it's just gotta act like S3.

rodwyersoftware 11mo ago
localstack, 100%
onei 11mo ago
I've used localstack in the past which worked pretty well. https://github.com/localstack/localstack https://github.com/localstack/localstack

Aurornis 11mo ago

> For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see [MinIO AIStor] Naming the product “AIStor” is one of the most blatant forced AI branding pivots I’ve seen.

positisop 11mo ago
Raising 100 mil at 1 B valuation and then trying for an exit is a bitch!
evil-olive 11mo ago
for maximum performance with MinIO AIStor, make sure to use one of Seagate's "AI hard drives": https://www.seagate.com/products/video-analytics/skyhawk-ai-hard-drive/ https://www.seagate.com/products/video-analytics/skyhawk-ai-...
bityard 11mo ago
And the naming conflicts with NVidia's AIStore (https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore). The two products are extremely similar. I don't know which came first, but Minio is going to want to do another pivot very soon if they want to survive. I doubt they have the resources to stand up to NVidia's army of extremely well-paid IP lawyers.
- Natfan 11mo ago
  this is no different than grok vs groq imo. aistor and aistore are different names, even if they're pronounced similarly.

atemerev 11mo ago

How it makes sense? If they are no longer open-source S3 and cloud only, I'll just use S3.

zerofor_conduct 11mo ago

“The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.” ― Jean Renoir

st3fan 11mo ago

What a story. EOL the open source foundation of your commercial product, to which many people contributed, to turn it into a closed source "A-Ff*ing-I Store" .. seriously what the ...

binsquare 11mo ago
I still don't understand what the difference is. What is an AI Stor (e missing on purpose because that is how it is branded: https://www.min.io/product/aistor https://www.min.io/product/aistor)
- bigbuppo 11mo ago
  About a billion dollars difference in valuation up until the bubble pops.
- everfrustrated 11mo ago
  Might be because of this other storage product named that https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore
  - singhrac 11mo ago
    Does anyone use this? I was setting it up a few months ago but it felt very complicated compared to MinIO (or alternatives). Is there a sort of minikube-like tool I could use here?
    - 56kbr 11mo ago
      There's a development/playground deployment for local K8s (e.g. Minikube, KinD): https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore/tree/main/deploy/dev/k8s https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore/tree/main/deploy/dev/k8s. For production you'd need a proper cluster deployed via Helm, but for trying it out locally that setup is easy to get running.
- paulddraper 11mo ago
  It can store things for AI workloads (and non-AI workloads, but who’s counting…)

Joel_Mckay 11mo ago

Like many smart people they focused on telling people the "how", and assume visitors to their wall of "AI"/hype text already understand the use-case "why". 1. I like that it is written in Go 2. I saw nothing above what Apache Spark+Hadoop with _consistent_ object stores already offers on Amazon (S3), Google Cloud (GCS), and or Microsoft (Azure Storage, ADLS Gen2) Best of luck, maybe folks should look around for that https://donate.apache.org/ https://donate.apache.org/ button before the tax year concludes =3

PunchyHamster 11mo ago
> I saw nothing above what Apache Spark+Hadoop with _consistent_ object stores already offers on Amazon (S3), Google Cloud (GCS), and or Microsoft (Azure Storage, ADLS Gen2) it was very simple to setup, and even if you just leased a bunch of servers off say OVH, far FAR cheaper to run your own than paying any of the big cloud providers. It also had pretty low requirements, ceph can do all that but setup is more complex and RAM requirements far, far higher
- Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
  MinIO still makes no sense, as Ceph is fundamentally already RADOS at its core (fully compatible with S3 API.) For a proper Ceph setup, even the 45drives budget configuration is still not "hobby" grade. I will have to dive into the MinIO manual at some point, as the value proposition still seems like a mystery. Cheers =3
  - dardeaup 11mo ago
    "Ceph is fundamentally already RADOS at its core (fully compatible with S3 API.)" Yes, Ceph is RADOS at its core. However, RADOS != S3. Ceph provides an S3 compatible backend with the RADOS Gateway (RGW).
    - Joel_Mckay 11mo ago
      My point was even 45drives virtualization of Ceph host roles to squeeze the entire setup into a single box was not a "hobby" grade project. I don't understand yet exactly what MinIO would add on top of that to make it relevant at any scale. I'll peruse the manual on the weekend, because their main site was not helpful. Thanks for trying though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 11mo ago

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ibgeek 11mo ago

Time to fork and bring back removed features. :). An advantage of it being AGPL licensed.

jdoe1337halo 11mo ago

I use this image on my VPS, it was the last update before they neutered the community version quay.io/minio/minio:RELEASE.2025-04-22T22-12-26Z

NietTim 11mo ago
Same here, since I'm the only one using my instance. But, you should be aware that there is an CVE in that version that allows any account level to increase their own permissions to admin level, so it's inherently unsafe
spapas82 11mo ago
This is a way too old version. You should use a newer one instead by downloading the source and built the binaries yourself. Here's a simple script that does it automagically (you'll need golang installed): > build-minio-ver.sh #!/bin/bash set -e VERSION=$(git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/minio/minio.git | \ grep -Eo 'RELEASE\.[0-9T-]+Z' | sort | tail -n1) echo "Building MinIO $VERSION ..." rm -rf /tmp/minio-build git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/minio/minio.git /tmp/minio-build cd /tmp/minio-build git fetch --tags git checkout "$VERSION" echo "Building minio..." CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath \ -ldflags "-s -w \ -X github.com/minio/minio/cmd.Version=$VERSION \ -X github.com/minio/minio/cmd.ReleaseTag=$VERSION \ -X github.com/minio/minio/cmd.CommitID=$(git rev-parse HEAD)" \ -o "$OLDPWD/minio" echo " Binary created at: $(realpath "$OLDPWD/minio")" "$OLDPWD/minio" --version

positisop 11mo ago

Raising 100 mil at 1 B valuation and then trying for an exit is a bitch!

aftbit 11mo ago

Shocker... they abandoned POSIX compatibility, built a massively over-complicated product, then failed to compete with things like Ceph on the metal side or ubiquitous S3/R2/B2 on the cloud side.

throwaway894345 11mo ago
> they abandoned POSIX compatibility, built a massively over-complicated product This is a wild sentence--how can you criticize them for abandoning POSIX support __and__ building a massively over-complicated product? Making a reliable POSIX system is inherently very complex.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- bee_rider 11mo ago
  I think the criticism (just interpreting the post, don’t know anything about the technical situation) is that the complication is not necessary/worthwhile. POSIX can be complicated, but it puts you in a nice ecosystem, so for some use-cases complex POSIX support is not over complicated. It is just… appropriately complicated.
  - throwaway894345 11mo ago
    Sure, but then you can make that argument about any of the features in Minio, in which case the parent's argument about Minio as a whole being overcomplicated is invalidated. Probably the more sensible way to look at things is "value / complexity" or "bang for buck", but even there I think POSIX loses since it's relatively little value for a relatively large amount of complexity.
    - bee_rider 11mo ago

bouk 11mo ago

big L for all the cloud providers that made the mistake of using it instead of forging their own path, they're kind of screwed now

tehjoker 11mo ago
How are they screwed if they can adopt the source and continue patching it? Writing their own would incur a greater cost.

deleted 11mo ago

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cies 11mo ago

I use Supabase Storage. It does S3-style signed download links (so I can switch to any S3 service if I like later).

adriatp 11mo ago

I had a minio server in my homelab and I have to replace it after the 15v because they capped almost all settings. So sad...

thway15269037 11mo ago

So, when anyone will fork in? Call it MaxIO or whatever. I might even submit couple of small patches. My only blocker for a fork to maintain compatibility and path to upgrade from earlier versions.

12_throw_away 11mo ago
To be fair, their previous behavior and attitude towards the open source license suggests that minio would possibly engage in at least a little bumptious legal posturing against whoever chose to fork it.

spapas82 11mo ago

Minio is more or less feature complete for most use cases. Actually the last big update of minio removed features (the UI). I am using minio for 5 years and haven't messed with it or used any new thingie for the last 5 years (i.e since I installed it); I only update to new versions. So if the minio maintainers (or anybody that forks the project and wants to work it) can fix any security issues that may occur I don't see any problems with using it.

cromka 11mo ago
> Actually the last big update of minio removed features (the UI) AFIK they removed it only to move it to their paid version, didn't they?
- lionkor 11mo ago
  yes
- spapas82 11mo ago
  Well I didn't mind when they removed it and certainly I didn't consider their paid version which is way too expensive for most use cases. The UI was useful when first configuring the buckets and permissions; if you've got it working (and don't need to change anything) you're good to go. Also, everything can be configured without the UI (not so easily of course).
fithisux 11mo ago
I used it for my experiments in Docker. I once or two used the UI, I always connected through python.
deeebug 11mo ago
> So if the minio maintainers (or anybody that forks the project and wants to work it) can fix any security issues that may occur I don't see any problems with using it. The concerning language for me is this part that was added: > Critical security fixes may be evaluated on a case-by-case basis It seems to imply that any fixes _may_ be merged in, but there's no guarantees.

souenzzo 11mo ago

The best software is the one that doesn't change.

liviux 11mo ago

Fork in Linux foundation incoming. Minio will revert in 1-2 years, but too late, community will move on and never return, reputation lost forever

phoronixrly 11mo ago
Just watch them harass fork users with proprietary stacks as they used to: https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13308#issuecomment-929254690 https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13308#issuecomment-929... https://github.com/minio/minio/discussions/13571#discussioncomment-1583482 https://github.com/minio/minio/discussions/13571#discussionc...
- speedgoose 11mo ago
  Oh no, I used MinIO once or twice for some unlicensed software. Should I contact a MinIO salesman to purchase an enterprise license ASAP or is it fine if I license my kids and advent of code solutions under the AGPLv3 license ?
- orphea 11mo ago
  > you may be violating AGPLv3 if you are using MinIO to build commercial products or using it for commercial purposes Yeah, this is bullshit. I wish the guy used his own advise and spoke to a lawyer :)
- ahepp 11mo ago
  Wait, what's the consensus on this? Are they saying that using object storage over a standard network API which they didn't even create, makes your application a derivative work of the object store? Or just that the users would need to make minio sources, including modifications, freely available? I guess that's kind of the big question inherent to the AGPL?
  - tetha 11mo ago
    From my understanding, you would not be allowed to sell an "S3 compatible storage" as a service based off of Minio or another AGPL licensed S3-compatible storage solution, especially if you modify the source code of minio in any way and then serve that to your customers. If you use Minio or another AGPL licensed service internally to support your own product without a customer ever touching it's API, it should be fine.

gethly 11mo ago

There is https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs I haver not used it but will be likely a good minio alternative for people who want to run a server and don't use minio just as s3 client.

lima 11mo ago
Is it stable now? Last time I checked, the amount of correctness bugs being fixed in the Git history wasn't very confidence-inspiring.
- yahooguntu 11mo ago
  We're in the process of moving to it, and it does seem to have a lot of small bugfixes flying around, but the maintainer is EXTREMELY responsive. I think we'll just end up doing a bit of testing before upgrading to newer versions. For our use case (3 nodes, 61TB of NVMe) it seems like the best option out of what I looked at (GarageFS, JuiceFS, Ceph). If we had 5+ nodes I'd probably have gone with Ceph though.
- rednb 11mo ago
  Since storage is a critical component, I closely watched it and engaged with the project for about 2 years circa as i contemplated adding it to our project, but the project is still immature from a reliability perspective in my opinion. No test suite, plenty of regressions, and data loss bugs on core code paths that should have been battled tested after so many years. There are many moving parts, which is both its strength and its weakness as anything can break - and does break. Even Erasure Coding/Decoding has had problems, but a guy from Proton has contributed a lot of fixes in this area lately. One of the big positive in my opinion, is the maintainer. He is an extremely friendly and responsive gentleman. Seaweedfs is also the most lightweight storage system you can find, and it is extremely easy to set up, and can run on servers with very little hardware resources. Many people are happy with it, but you'd better be ready to understand their file format to fix corruption issues by hand. As far as i am concerned, i realized that after watching all these bugs, the idea of using seaweedfs was causing me more anxiety than peace of mind. Since we didn't need to store billions of files yet, not even millions, we went with creating a file storage API in ASP.NET Core in 1 or 2 hours, hosted on a VPS, that we can replicate using rsync without problem. Since i made this decision, i have peace of mind and no longer think about my storage system. Simplicity is often better, and OSes have long been optimized to cache and serve files natively. If you are not interested in contributing fixes and digging into the file format when a problem occurs, and if your data is important to you, unless you operate at the billions of files scalability tier Seaweedfs shines at, i'd suggest rolling your own boring storage system.

killme2008 11mo ago

I can't believe they made this decision. It's detrimental to the open-source ecosystem and MinIO users, and it's not good for them either, just look at the Elasticsearch case.

apexalpha 11mo ago

So how are HN reviews of GarageHQ? Or any others?

speedgoose 11mo ago
I havn't tested it since a while, but it was pretty good and a lot simpler than MinIO. Like in the old MinIO days, an S3 object is a file on the filesystem, not some replicated blocks. You could always rebuild the full object store content with a few rsync. I appreciate the simplicity. My main concern was that you couldn't configure it easily through files, you had to use CLI, which wasn't very convenient. I hope this has changed.
- realreality 11mo ago
  Objects in Garage are broken up into 1MB (default) blocks, and compressed with zstandard. So, it would be difficult to reconstruct the files. I don't know if that was a recent change since you looked at it. Configuration is still through the CLI, though it's fairly simple. If your usecase is similar to the way that the Deuxfleurs organization uses it -- several heterogeneous, geographically distributed nodes that are more or less set-it-and-forget-it -- then it's probably a good fit.
  - speedgoose 11mo ago
    I guess this change was inevitable. But I like the possibility to reconstruct a broken distributed file storage system. GlusterFS also allowed this. My use case is relatively common : I want small S3 compatible object stores that can be deployed in Kubernetes without manual intervention. The CLI part was a bit in the way last time, this could have been automated but it wasn't straightforward.
realreality 11mo ago
Garage works well for its limited feature set, but it doesn't have very active development. Apparently they're working on a management UI. Seaweedfs is more mature and has many interfaces (S3, webdav, SFTP, REST, fuse mount). It's most appropriate for storing lots of small files. I prefer the command line interface and data/synchronization model of Garage, though. It's easier to manage, probably because the developers aren't biting off more than they can chew.

deleted 11mo ago

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nazcan 11mo ago

I'm quite interested in a k8s-native file-system that makes use of local persistent volumes. I'm running cockroachDB in my cluster (not yet with local persistent volumes.. but getting closer). Anyone have any suggestions?

Eikon 11mo ago

I've been using Minio in ZeroFS' [0] CI (a POSIX compliant filesystem that works on top of s3). I guess I'll switch to MicroCeph [1]. [0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS [1] https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/ https://canonical-microceph.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/

ahepp 11mo ago
What is the use case for implementing a POSIX filesystem on top of an object store? I remember reading this article a few years ago, which happens to be by the minio folks: https://blog.min.io/filesystem-on-object-store-is-a-bad-idea/ https://blog.min.io/filesystem-on-object-store-is-a-bad-idea...
- Eikon 11mo ago
  > What is the use case for implementing a POSIX filesystem on top of an object store? The use case is fully stateless infrastructure: your file/database servers become disposable and interchangeable (no "pets"), because all state lives in S3. This dramatically simplifies operations, scaling, and disaster recovery, and it's cheap since S3 (or at least, S3 compatible services) storage costs are very low. The MinIO article's criticisms don't really apply here because ZeroFS doesn't store files 1:1 to S3. It uses an LSM-tree database backed by S3, which allows it to implement proper POSIX semantics with actual performance.
  - ahepp 11mo ago
    It makes sense that some of the criticisms wouldn't apply if you're not storing the files 1:1. What about NFS or traditional filesystems on iSCSI block devices? I assume you're not using those because managing/scaling/HA for them is too painful? What about the openstack equivalents of EFS/EBS? Or Ceph's fs/blockdev solutions (although looking into it a bit, it seems like those are based on its object store)?

vanschelven 11mo ago

Is there a good overview of recent Open Source Rugpulls in the vein of killedbygoogle.com somewhere?

ncrmro 11mo ago

As a note ceph (rook on kubernetes) which is distributed blockstorage has a built in s3 endpoint support

valyala 11mo ago

What is the purpose of MinIO, Seaweedfs and similar object storage systems? They lack durability guarantees provided by S3 and GCS. They lack "infinite" storage promise contrary to S3 and GCS. They lack "infinite" bandwidth unlike S3 and GCS. They are more expensive than other storage options, unlike S3 and GCS.

onionisafruit 11mo ago
I haven't used it in a while, but it used to be great as a test double for s3
maartin0 11mo ago
It's great for a prototype which doesn't need to store a huge amount of data, you can run it on the same VM as a node server behind Cloudflare and get a fairly reliable setup going
cortesoft 11mo ago
We use it because we are already running our own k8s clusters in our datacenters, and we have large storage requirements for tools that have native S3 integration, and running our own minio clusters in the same datacenter as the tools that generate and consume that data is a lot faster and cheaper than using S3. For example, we were running a 20 node k8s cluster for our Cortex (distributed Prometheus) install, monitoring about 30k servers around the world, and it was generating a bit over a TB of data a day. It was a lot more cost effective and performant to create a minio cluster for that data than to use S3. Also, you can get durability with minio with multi cluster replication.
- valyala 11mo ago
  Consider migrating to VictoriaMetrics and saving on storage costs and operations costs. You also won't need MinIO, since it stores data to local filesystem (aka to regular persistent volumes). See real-world reports from happy users who saved costs on a large-scale Prometheus-compatible monitoring - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/casestudies/ https://docs.victoriametrics.com/victoriametrics/casestudies...

paulddraper 11mo ago

Open source is not a sustainable business model. There are two ways open source projects continue. 1. The creator has a real, solid way to make money (React by Facebook, Go by Google). 2. The project is extremely popular (Linux, PostreSQL). Is it possible for people to reliably keep working for ~free? In theory yes, but if you expect that, you have a very bad understanding of 98% of human behavior.

conqrr 11mo ago
They are making lot of enterpise bucks though. And they did start as Open Source. Killing it midway to serve their convenience is the issue. There's also tonne of Open Source that isn't as popular but serving niche communities. It's definitely harder but not impossible. OS core and paid hosting with bells and whistles has proven to be a good sustainable model.
- paulddraper 11mo ago
  > OS core and paid hosting with bells and whistles has proven to be a good sustainable model Redis, Elasticsearch, Terraform, MongoDB, CockroachDB have all changed their OSS licenses in recent years.
mschuster91 11mo ago
There's actually three ways, the third one being academia picking up the bill which is how we got the mess that is OpenStack. Also, Debian has been around for a few decades, although I do admit that - like the Linux kernel - that wouldn't have been possible without a lot of companies contributing back to the ecosystem.

0x1ch 11mo ago

> Kill open source features. > Gaslight community when rightfully annoyed > Kill off primary product > Offer same product with AI slapped on the name to enterprise customers. Good riddance Minio, and goodbye!

spicymaki 11mo ago

Stallman was right. When will the developer community learn not to contribute to these projects with awful CLAs. The rug has been pulled.

pabs3 11mo ago
MinIO doesn't seem to have had a CLA though?
- EgoIncarnate 11mo ago
  MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
  - woooooo 11mo ago
    Isn't that standard protective boilerplate so that they cant get rugpulled themselves on a contribution, 2 years later? I thought the ASF had something similar.
    - EgoIncarnate 11mo ago
      Requiring AGPL on the contribution would also prevent a rugpull. MinIO went beyond that. The wording gives an Apache license only to MinIO, not to people who use it. So MinIO can relicense the the contributor code under a commercially viable license, but no one else can. Everyone else will only have access to the contribution under AGPL as part of the whole project.
      - woooooo 11mo ago
        Ah I didnt realize there were 2 different licenses at play, yeah that's a little sus.

hintymad 11mo ago

I suspect that Clickhouse will go down the same path. They already changed their roadmap a bit two years ago[1], and had good reasons: if the open sourced version does too well, it will compete with their cloud business. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608186

victormy 11mo ago

Big thanks to MinIO, RustFS, and Garage for their contributions. That said, MinIO closing the door on open source so abruptly definitely spooked the community. But honestly, fair play to them—open source projects eventually need a path to monetization. I’ve evaluated both RustFS and Garage, and here’s the breakdown: Release Cadence: Garage feels a bit slower, while RustFS is shipping updates almost weekly. Licensing: Garage is on AGPLv3, but RustFS uses the Apache license (which is huge for enterprise adoption). Stability: Garage currently has the edge in distributed environments. With MinIO effectively bowing out of the OSS race, my money is on RustFS to take the lead.

ahepp 11mo ago
> open source projects eventually need a path to monetization I guess I'm curious if I'm understanding what you mean here, because it seems like there's a huge number of counterexamples. GNU coreutils. The linux kernel. FreeBSD. NFS and iSCSI drivers for either of those kernels. Cgroups in the Linux kernel. If anything, it seems strange to expect to be able to monetize free-as-in-freedom software. GNU freedom number 0 is "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose". I don't see anything in there about "except for business purposes", or anything in there about "except for businesses I think can afford to pay me". It seems like a lot of these "open core" cloud companies just have a fundamental misunderstanding about what free software is. Which isn't to say I have anything against people choosing to monetize their software. I couldn't afford to give all my work away for free, which is why I don't do that. However, I don't feel a lot of sympathy to people who surely use tons of actual libre software without paying for it, when someone uses their libre software without paying.
- mikestorrent 11mo ago
  I think, if anything, in this age of AI coding we should see a resurgence in true open-source projects where people are writing code how they feel like writing it and tossing it out into the world. The quality will be a mixed bag! and that's okay. No warranty expressed or implied. As the quality rises and the cost of AI coding drops - and it will, this phase of $500/mo for Cursor is not going to last - I think we'll see plenty more open source projects that embody the spirit you're talking about. The trick here is that people may not want to be coding MinIO. It's like... just not that fun of a thing to work on, compared to something more visible, more elevator-pitchy, more sexy. You spend all your spare time donating your labour to a project that... serves files? I the lowly devops bow before you and thank you for your beautiful contribution, but I the person meeting you at a party wonder why you do this in particular with your spare time instead of, well, so many other things. I've never understood it, but then, that's why I'm not a famous open-source dev, right?

ta9000 11mo ago

[dead]

pabs3 11mo ago

Anyone know if MinIO AIStor is legal? AFAICT MinIO didn't have a CLA and there are 559 non-@minio.io commit authors in the git history, which could be an AGPL violation if they didn't get contributor approval for the license change. Or is AIStor a fresh codebase written from scratch? Edit: some discussion of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136871

EgoIncarnate 11mo ago
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...

lynn_xx 11mo ago

MinIO is a great open-source project. I’m familiar with it because I previously worked with Longhorn. But for any project to sustain long-term development, it needs a viable business model to support ongoing investment and growth.

jsiepkes 11mo ago

There is also Ambry ( https://github.com/linkedin/ambry https://github.com/linkedin/ambry ) as an alternative. The blob store open-sourced, created and maintained by LinkedIn. It also has an S3 compatible interface. I think it is about 10 years old now and it is really stable.

createaccount99 11mo ago

So why exactly did they close source, what were they losing by having AGPL? I thought AGPL + selling private licenses to corps was a fantastic method of getting some income for an open source offering.

rzerowan 11mo ago
The moves they have been making seem to be similar to what one would see if the VC money was getting tight or alternatively they were bought out by a Private Equity firm. Similar to the way Broadcom did with VMware hiking prices astronomically for their largest clients, and basically killing the SME offering.