>The price of support comes in at at slightly less than the equivalent amount of S3 storage

That's absurd. I would be running to NetApp and Dell for competitive object storage quotes then. Haven't done pricing on either one recently but at least a few years ago they were roughly half the price of S3 all in (including hosting costs).

That does sound much worse than hiding the pre-built images from users. I hope that documentation is archived. There's probably some benefit in documenting those installation tips elsewhere besides Github comments.

During an upgrade, I discovered that the console had been removed without any prior notice. MinIO really pissed me off. Over a month ago, I started looking for a MinIO alternative and found RustFS. I've been testing RustFS for over a month now, and the product continues to improve, with the community fixing bugs very quickly. I hope YC will invest in this company.

Well, gosh. Maybe I’m glad I didn’t get that documentation job with MinIO after all.

With 100PB clusters being built and not a cent going to them, you can see why minio has gone this route. I wonder if they will be "valkeyed"? Not by AWS presumably.

Nah, it's fine. It's Open Source, you can document it yourself if you need to! But there is no obligation from the MinIO authors to provide it, you're not entitled to it.

What ladder are they pulling up? Feel free to fork the last valid commit and make a competitor.

Is it an excuse? Maintaining code costs money, and the previous versions are provided under the license, and you're free to modify it, pull selective patches and maintain them yourself. While It'd be convenient if the license was a promise to develop and maintain features for free in perpetuity, it just isn't.

I run into this in non-company backed open source projects all the time too. Some maintainer gets burned out or non-interested and all they're rewarded is people with pitchforks because they thought there were some sort of obligations to provide free updates and suppport

I understand the frustration; however using anything VC-funded, you are not paying for, is pretty risky.

When you always published and built Docker images for the public you are creating an expectation, people will rely on that and will chose your software based on that expectation.

You suddenly deciding that you won't be offering updated Docker images especially after a CVE and with no prior notice (except a hidden commit 4 days ago that updated the README) is approaching malicious-level actions.

If they truly cared about their community and still wanted to go through the decision of not offering public docker builds the responsible thing to do is offer a warning period, start adding notices in the repo (gh and docker) and create an easy migration path, even endorse or help some community members who would be fine with taking care of the public builds of the image.

But no, they introduced the change, made no public statement about it, waited for someone to notice this, offered no explanation and went silent. After a huge CVE. Irresponsible.

MinIO is not actually open source, their source code is just public.

The company I work at spun up a MinIO instance, and we got hounded by MinIO lawyers claiming we had to pay because "hosting MinIO alters the source because of injecting configuration" and therefore violates their open source license.

There have been multiple hacker news threads about this:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35328316

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32148007

> It's an Open Source project - I don't understand what people are complaining about

MinIO is a commercial company that provides some open source components and some paid components and services.

This meme where nobody is allowed to be unhappy with anything when the phrase “open source” is involved is getting old. In the span of two paragraphs your comment discovered why this is frustrating people: They have been providing certain things in the open source leg of their operation and then yanking them and stuffing them under a very expensive commercial leg later, after people have begun using them.

Being upset about that is reasonable and understandable, even if it triggers some of the people who believe “open source” means nobody is allowed to be unhappy with anything, ever.

It's legit. Just gives people the impression that it is sabotaging the community. I understand why they do it (the more inconvenience the more likely people are gonna pay), but wish companies are more thoughtful on open sourcing code and how to differentiate enterprise offerings at the beginning, rather than playing tricks after gaining tractions.

They are entitled to stop building docker images. Their users are entitled to get salty and go find alternative products.

If that is Minio’s expectation, then all is good, but it seems kinda counterproductive? I never liked minio, but I certainly wouldn’t use it after seeing them remove features.

Certainly, there are some pretty entitled people on that github issue.

But this attitude is too far the other way. Fair enough, you are under no obligation to continue providing a free service. But isn't it fair to give a bit of notice before withdrawing it? Especially after doing it so consistently for so long. Not legally required, sure, but polite.

They haven't even given notice after withdrawing it! They just waited for someone to realise and ask about it.

Bear in mind that many paid for services, on a subscription basis, technically allow the seller to change (i.e. reduce!) the service at any time. If they act in bad faith to their free tier, what should you expect about their paid tiers? You could argue you also shouldn't be using paid services that could behave that way but I think you'd struggle not to.

> I don't understand what people are complaining about. Noone is entitled to receive free Docker images.

Every time I read something like this, I recall this post from Rich Hickey[1][2] on why no one is entitled to benefit from another human being's goodwill and time.

From the post:

> The only people entitled to say how open source 'ought' to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects.

> Just because someone open sources something does not imply they owe the world a change in their status, focus and effort, e.g. from inventor to community manager.

[1] - https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95....

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123

Company makes Open Source. Open Source community enbraces it, helps it to become the defacto standard.

Company does a rug pull because they are unable to make a proper business out of it and leaves the community hanging dry.

Removing the container image build step, which was ALREADY THERE, and doing this internaly only, is the gatekeeping they are now doing.

Its like 0 effort to provide these images.

And yes pricing pages like this is always the same: You don't get any deal below 1k / month minimum because they have some pre-sales people and a payment pipeline which doesn't work for anything small or startup like.

Somehow i don't get MinIO anyway. They got over 100 Million of investment for an S3 system. Its basically a done product. Its also a typical 'invest once build it once, keep it running' thing which can easily be replicated with a little bit of investment from other companies.

I have no clue how they ever got valued over 100 Million.

Years ago I worked in customer service. There was this guy who came in to to motivate us. He talked about the work of someone named Bob Farrell who had a chain of ice cream shops and sold burgers. He had received a letter from a disappointed customer. The customer had been given the extra pickles on his burgers for years and now one of Bob's employees told him he now had to pay extra for it. The customer said he'd never come back. Bob could have said "what an entitled idiot" and kept charging for pickles but he took that letter as a calling for how you should treat customers - just give 'em the pickle. It costs you next to nothing to give the customer the pickle and it makes them happy.

Minio doesn't have to give non-paying users anything, but the story still applies. Give them the pickle. It costs nothing in the grand scheme of things, and if it does, ask for donations like any open source project would do to cover your costs. But as others have pointed out, Minio is not an open source company, they are a commercial company that has source available.

Well removing any distribution after a CVE is a nice touch ...

> I don't understand what people are complaining about

Talk is cheap. People will complain about something they’re not legally entitled to because there’s no downside, only an upside if the company backtracks.

In the background they are probably creating tickets to mitigate the risk if the complaining doesn’t work. It’s perfectly rational.

I don’t understand the people who don’t understand this.

You're correct, however:

1. The MinIO image on Docker Hub has more than a billion downloads [^0]. With those download counts, people have almost certainly written scripts that rely on this image existing (including their own Dockerfile! [^1]). Them leaving these images around is just asking for security breaches later down the line.

1b. While, yes, no-one's entitled to freely-available container images, it cost them almost nothing to maintain their existing toolchain for this. Them deciding to pull the plug is purely and entirely a money grab (and a dumb one, if you ask me; look at how the community responded with OpenTofu when Terraform when BUSL).

2. Fortunately, MinIO is a Golang app and can be built with a simple "go install" (though the build instructions in their docs don't align with the build recipe in their Makefile [^2]). However, they could pull a Tesla and make the source that they publish differ from the source that their binaries are built from.

3. They gave NO notice. That's the slimiest part of all of this. Tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters, and handfuls of enterprise products, run or package MinIO that are now using images that will no longer be updated. All of these people will need to completely change their toolchains to account for that, and soon. That's just not a kind thing to do.

[^0] https://hub.docker.com/r/minio/minio/tags

[^1] https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/Dockerfile

[^2] https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/Makefile#L179

"It's an Open Source project - I don't understand what people are complaining about. Noone is entitled to receive free Docker images. "

While this is true, in all of these discussions, somewhere the notion of responsibility often gets lost.

If you publish a project, encourage people to use it, promote it heavily, etc, then get lots of users, and then decide to kill it, while it's true you legally owe nobody anything, it's sort of crazy to claim people are acting entitled when they complain.

After all, you encouraged people to use it and promoted it!

Again, do you legally owe them anything? Nope.

I am much more empathetic towards those who get surprised by the growth of their projects, or otherwise didn't try to make their project popular and decide to quit when it becomes too large too quickly and becomes a burden.

In general, if you try to encourage lots of people to use or do something and succeed at that, you end up with various forms of social responsibility to those people. That's true in most things, not just open source.

Open source does not get a pass at this social reality simply because, as a legal reality, those users are not owed anything.

Usually it's the short notice that gets peoples' hackles up. It's kind of a dirty trick. Everyone knows things can change.

You don't understand, or don't agree with the complaints. Those are two different things, and I suspect you understand why people are complaining and instead disagree with the complaints.

People are complaining because something was available, they adopted it, then it was discontinued. Apparently with little warning, and after they'd been encouraged to adopt it by the provider of the images.

As it happens, I agree with the general idea that if folks are not paying for the convenience of builds, then it's on them to work from source. However, it's better IMO if a vendor or project start from that position rather than what's seen as a rug-pull.

Of course, it's part of the playbook: when something is new and not widely adopted, the vendor goes to great effort to encourage adoption -- then the vendor starts looking at the paid vs. free usage and sees "huh, we have a 10000:1 ratio of paid to free users, including ten megacorps that show up grabbing binaries every 10 minutes for their CI/CD farm, and asking questions in our forums, but aren't paying a penny toward development and our investors are getting pissy."

Exactly. looked up their github to see what the big issue was about and they still provide the full source + the Dockerfile. It's not a huge issue that it is being made into. Does no-one know how to build a Docker image any more?

But a properly built image is a nice part of a product release.

Building a quality production ready image is not trivial, and it's always welcomed from the vendor.

Back in July I clarified precisely what people are complaining about. It should clear up the matter.

https://sneak.berlin/20250720/minio-are-assholes/

Uh this is a superficial take. It almost certainly took more effort to hide the images from the public than to publish them.

The community that made them is being shit on.

Or one can just use old images. Which is what many people started doing after their other fuckup - removing perfectly working web UI from free version.

They just can't stop shooting themselves in the foot that didn't even heal from last time.

The last tag with a working web UI is RELEASE.2025-04-22T22-12-26Z btw.

> 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

Can vouch for it as an adequate self-hostable option. It has some missing features, compared to Minio, and is less compatible but works for most applications.

I find garage to require quite a lot of fiddling.

Afaik Ceph has its own object-storage functionality as well, which seems to be S3-compatible: https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/radosgw/#object-gateway

Doesn't support if-match.

OK, we updated the title to your suggested one now.

For those left wondering what the original title was, it said minio went source-only.

I don't see the problem in either case. For a Gentoo user, it changes nothing.

That was my interpretation of the title when I first clicked it. Still interesting but easy to misunderstand nevertheless.

If anyone is wondering, the Dockerfile for this repo (thanks for sharing!) basically just copies the binary in, it is a 19 line dockerfile.

I see both sides of the argument here, the people maintaining minio should not have to push docker images for free, it is work to maintain and test, especially across all the host platforms. And, this work isn't that complicated if you want to do it yourself.

https://github.com/golithus/minio-builds/blob/main/Dockerfil...

Curious how you handle legal reviews by your customers' shipping AGPL licensed software? We've had a lot of pushback from legal even on licenses like MPL

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

For VC-backed companies -- or anything else where it's spend now, profit later -- the bait-and-switch is practically inevitable.

(Or, of course, the company can simply stop contributing, either from going out-of-business, or pivoting, or being acquired, etc.)

If you're considering building long term on oss from a for-profit company you should count on having to pay in the future. You should believe you have a decent understanding of their business model so you have an idea of how much you might need to pay. Of course that's usually very difficult for VC-backed "spend now, pay later" companies, so you might be best off avoiding them for anything long-term or foundational unless you think you can bear to switch, possibly on short notice.

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

> 1. MinIO is a business and they don't owe anything to anyone for free.

I don't think MinIO discontinuing the free docker image is really the problem here. Creating and distributing such images cost them practically nothing - either in infrastructure costs or in HR costs. If they find it that difficult, they only need to say it. Either the community or another company will gladly take it up for free. Even other cloud projects have alternative distributions like Bitnami builds.

The real issue is the pattern of behavior that this move exposes. They seem to have removed the web UI from the community edition claiming that it's hard to maintain (another thing the community would have gladly taken up if they were informed). They also stopped updating the community documentation. And these largely escaped attention until the docker build was discontinued. That itself is controversial since much effort wasn't spent in letting the users know that their current image was going to suffer bitrot indefinitely. Apparently there was also a CVE which was fixed in the source. They didn't consider it necessary to at least push the fixed container as a final measure.

All these are certainly hostile and unkind towards the community and it's bordering on dishonesty. They didn't lie. But neither did they do the bare minimum expected when taking such a drastic measure. It's clear that they're withdrawing their generosity for more profits after gaining a lot of mindshare with their earlier offering. I don't believe that the docker image alone would have inflamed the community so much.

Done: https://github.com/golithus/minio-builds

garage devs have told me of 10PiB+ deployments in production, but I've never operated one at that scale so I can't share much insight into the experience. Probably best to ask on their matrix chat.

I don't think the people in this thread have any concept of how much $$$ it costs to distribute a free container that is going to be downloaded billions of times.

You are a farmer, not a big fancy profitable one. Your tractor is from 1970 and works great, when it works. Your wife has health problems and can't really help out around the farm much - kids have gone off - so you just do things mostly by yourself. With your lucky dog Skip by your side. Even though times are tough and money ain't coming in like it used to - you still give free produce to the local schools and shelters. You've been doing it for over 20 years, and the community loves you for it.

But then your wife passes. Medical bills are too high. You can't give away free produce to the local schools anymore.

The community is outraged. They come to your farm with pitchforks. They set your barn and fields on fire.

This is kinda what this thread feels like lol.

I don't understand the point. The entire raison d'être of this project is that you self-host it and don't pay money for S3 and control your supply chain.

If you are denied this possibility — it is much easier just to use S3.

They have also removed the web UI and stopped updating the documentation for the community edition. The former is not extremely serious as the community can easily replace it. The latter is arguably the worst among all the changes that we know of. While they do redirect community documentation towards its enterprise counterpart, it's becoming clear that the differences in the community edition won't be addressed at all. That will make MinIO community edition less viable over time.

Overall, it's pretty clear that they don't view the OSS users kindly or want them around. I'm pretty sure that they would drop the entire community edition if they could do so legally and without much fuzz. You can expect more like this in the future. So this story shouldn't be seen simply as the loss of a docker image.

> If the org behind it ever decides to rugpull/elastic you

I love it that you use "elastic" as a verb here.

If you want VC funding, your marketing pages need to go all-in on AI. Even if your product has nothing to do with it.

Wow, ~75 lines of Dockerfile and ~300 lines of github actions, hosted on a FREE platform.

Seriously, what is the rage here, anyone could do this.

I have a 160TB minio cluster running for 4+ years who had dealt beautifully with node outages, one drive failure and the occassional hiccups on the datacenter.

I was okay with not having support because I am not part of their customer base. I was okay with not having the webUI, though I wish they made an option where the webUI would be available for some basic-tier paid customers. But I can not be okay with this move. They are just giving the finger to all the community. They never tried to work out a solution that could let smaller users to contribute or support.

I will seriously have to consider moving to Hetzner object storage.

Every time I used it for more than that I ran into performance and other concerns (like durability and consistency) pretty quickly. I cannot imagine how this is used seriously when there is something like Ceph available.

Turns out most file systems are horrible key-value stores.

Yeah CI tests and local dev environments for code that runs against S3 in prod. Right now sifting through the alternatives for whatever is easiest to run as a container in Github actions or docker-compose...

I use it to test my tiny written-from-scratch S3 client in my server app. But then I already have it installed, it already works, and I don't care about updates.

That's how I use it. It seems to also provide a lot of other stuff I don't use.

What did you lose exactly, I don't get it.

thoughts on https://github.com/coollabsio/minio ?

I feel like this could be used till the time plane.so or other projects feel like they could migrate to garage or maybe just use these coollabsio minio docker image?

> Leaving a known unsafe version as the last release is irresponsible.

I think they should have done a better job of announcing this ahead of time (or at all, really); but there's realistically never going to be a CVE-free release to stop on, because the next CVE is just around the corner.

What is Cloudian? You guys didn't develop Minio did you? (Google says Minio Inc?) If you did it's hard to tell.

#ad

https://github.com/coollabsio/minio

Can't emphasize on it enough but I trust the coolify team enough. Lets all jump to this ig

There are people who are being the change they want to see, thanks coolify team.

back in the day, I had an automated Github action that would pull and build a polyfill.io image every time there was a tagged release

You don't even need to fork the project, you can just extend / distribute

Which would be very relevant if anyone were trying to sue them for this - which no one is.

The license establishes the limits of legal requirements and responsibilities. It doesn't shield you from criticisms and people being annoyed with you.

I like the GPL it has given us a lot.

I am guessing here but I do understand why they want people to open source the management code of minio and in some cases how it is integrated into a product. I understand that AGPL might not be written for these requirements but I think it is time for a new such license.

If it is part of a SaaS product that is sold I can definitely understand why this is important.

Do you have a link? I want to read more about that. Did they interpret any use as deriving from minio?

I've used the minio-go client library for about a year now. I don't see anything in the minio-go README or elsewhere to make me think it will no longer be supported. In fact, the most recently merged PR was yesterday. There are some other Go S3 clients, like https://github.com/kelindar/s3, but I don't know if any other Go S3 clients have the complete set of features that minio-go has.

Surely there's github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2 ?

(Render CEO) We're prioritizing Object Storage independent of this move.

there's still gocloud.dev/blob ...

They created their business on open source. Free software was their top of funnel. Free customers become paid customers, and fund the business. They are more than welcome to change this, but there is no way they don't end up with egg on their face, and that's what we're seeing here.

Have been looking for minio alternative for long already. Found versitygw lately and would like to share the joy. It feels very promising. Fits to many small or lab use cases.

It does not actually solve the trickiness of managing large storage but relies on the backend (that is usually fs like zfs in small setups).

However, seems to be quite new project plus the risk, that the owning company takes it to bad direction, is there too.

https://github.com/versity/versitygw/

It would be cool if The Linux Foundation had a fund to support open-source devs with stuff, like a stipend or hosting costs, kind of like what exists in the hospitality space. I know that this sort-of exists, but it feels distributed amongst a few big companies and is entirely at the whims of their quarterly performance.

Do we need a fork? As an example, ffmpeg is source only for mac and windows, which just means someone else is building and distributing binaries.

What for? The code hasn't changed, it's AGPL-3.0. They just don't release their own binaries or docker images anymore.

Demanding people do free work for you, like starting a fork on your expedited schedule is quite juvenile.

Forks take time and effort from humans to maintain.

not sure that word means what you think it means

>It only works if everyone in the ecosystem is honest

In general, applying this to anything with the general public, I don't expect it to work. This is why we have laws, licenses and rules in the first place. You can preach all you want but it won't change humanity, you need something concrete, something written and agreed, like a license.

Not all licenses protect the freedoms and rights you're used to in other licenses, and it needs to be taken into account when adopting any project. License terms that don't guarantee any sort of support or updates when you need them aren't in consideration at that point.

Isn't your diatribe contradictory. Your last paragraph appears to contradict your 'beliefs'.