MinIO is now in maintenance-mode • Hacker News Board

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#101

Post by mbreese » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #93

mbreese wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there would be an issue with removing AGPL contributed code. You can't force someone to distribute something they don't want to. IANAL, but I believe that what (all?) copyright in software is most concerned with is the active distribution of code -- not the removal of code. That said, if there was contributed AGPL code, they couldn't change the license on that part of the code w/o a CLA. AGPL also doesn…

That's definitely not how its written or interpreted. Microsoft had to release code because they touched GPL code some years back I think it was for HyperV? We're talking about a company with many lawyers at the ready not being able to skirt the GPL in any way, like undoing the code. Additionally, in order to CHANGE the license, if others contributed code under that license, you would need their permission, on top of…

What I'm really curious about is if their most recent enterprise versions/code must be released under AGPL. And if so, can they restrict customers from distributing AGPL'd code through an enterprise contract?

I can't see how this is a defensible position for Minio, but I'm not sure they really care that much at this point.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#102

Post by spicypixel » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

import wrote: post #28

Dachande663 wrote: post #19

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.

rclone serve s3, could be.

This is the winner

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#103

Post by perbu » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

tlarkworthy wrote: post #45

candiddevmike wrote: post #38

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.

? Its like GET /object, PUT /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.

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.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#104

Post by uroni » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #65

uroni wrote: post #42

I've been working on 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.

Interesting! I like the relative simplicity and durability guarantees. I can see using this for dev and proof of concept. Or in situations where HA/RAID are handled lower in the stack. What is the performance like for reads, writes, and deletes? And just to play devil's advocate: What would you say to someone who argues that you've essentially reimplemented a filesystem?

It uses LMDB, so if the object mapping fits in memory that should be pretty optimal for reading, while using the build-in Linux page cache and not a separate one (important for testing use cases). For write/deletes it has a bit of write-amplification due to the copy-on-write btree. I've implemented a separate, optional WAL for this and also a mode where writes/delete can be bundeled in a transaction, but in practice I think the performance difference should not matter.

W.r.t. filesystem: Yes, aware of this. Initially used minio and also implemented the use case directly on XFS as well and only had problems at larger scales (that still fit on a machine) with it. Ceph went into a similar direction with BlueStore (reimplementing the filesystem, but with RocksDB).

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#105

Post by bityard » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #57

> 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.

And the naming conflicts with NVidia's 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.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#106

Post by ralgozino » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

Dachande663 wrote: post #19

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.

Do you want to serve already existing files from a directory or just that the backend is a directory on your server?

If the answer is the latter, seaweedfs is an option:

https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs?tab=readme-ov-file#qu...

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#107

Post by everfrustrated » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

binsquare wrote: post #97

st3fan wrote: post #60

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 ...

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 )

Might be because of this other storage product named that https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#108

Post by throwaway894345 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

aftbit wrote: post #79

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.

> 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.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#109

Post by PunchyHamster » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

aftbit wrote: post #79

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.

No, they rebranded to AIStor and are now selling to AI companies.

Minio is/was pretty solid product for places where rack of servers for Ceph wasn't an option (it does have quite a bit higher memory requirements), or you just need a bit of S3 (like we have small local instances that just run as build cache for CI/CD)

But that's not where money is

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#110

Post by kragen » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #85

giancarlostoro wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there would be an issue with removing AGPL contributed code. You can't force someone to distribute something they don't want to. IANAL, but I believe that what (all?) copyright in software is most concerned with is the active distribution of code -- not the removal of code. That said, if there was contributed AGPL code, they couldn't change the license on that part of the code w/o a CLA. AGPL also doesn…

> AGPL also doesn't necessarily mean you have to make the code publicly available, just available to those that you give the program to (I'm assuming AGPL is like the GPL in this regard).

This is the crucial difference between the AGPL and the GPL: the AGPL requires you to make the code available to users for whom you run the code, as well as users you give the program to.