MinIO is now in maintenance-mode • Hacker News Board

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#281

Post by antman » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 6:32 AM UTC

victormy wrote: post #233

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:…

SeaweedFS with S3 API? Differentiates itself with claims of ease of use and small files optimization

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#282

Post by lmc » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 6:35 AM UTC

victormy wrote: post #233

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:…

Any idea who is behind RustFS?

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#283

Post by antman » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 6:39 AM UTC

elzbardico wrote: post #256

peterashford wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"open source projects eventually need a path to monetization" Why?

Human beings have this strange desire to be fed, have shelter and other such mundane stuff, all of those clearly less important than software in the big scheme of things, of course.

Many open source are not core business but supporting layers of overall organisations getting free PRs. Others are pet projects that tried to do too many things and overextended themselves for little additional value failing any sort of sustainability logic. Others had a larger range of features required than the original dev was aware of.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#284

Post by pabs3 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 6:42 AM UTC

elzbardico wrote: post #255

ahepp wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think there's still someone actively working on the Linux kernel without receiving a salary, and this for the last two decades more or less.

You would be incorrect, LWN tracks statistics about contributor employers for every Linux kernel release and their latest post about that says that "(None)" (ie unpaid contributions) beat a number of large companies, including RedHat by the lines changed metric, or SUSE by the changesets metric.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1046966/f957408bbdd4d388/

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#285

Post by foota » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 6:48 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #284

elzbardico wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's still someone actively working on the Linux kernel without receiving a salary, and this for the last two decades more or less.

You would be incorrect, LWN tracks statistics about contributor employers for every Linux kernel release and their latest post about that says that "(None)" (ie unpaid contributions) beat a number of large companies, including RedHat by the lines changed metric, or SUSE by the changesets metric. https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1046966/f957408bbdd4d388/

Well yes, but the vast majority of changes (~95%, by either changes or lines) seem to be from contributors supported by employers.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#286

Post by pabs3 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 6:49 AM UTC

foota wrote: post #285

pabs3 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be incorrect, LWN tracks statistics about contributor employers for every Linux kernel release and their latest post about that says that "(None)" (ie unpaid contributions) beat a number of large companies, including RedHat by the lines changed metric, or SUSE by the changesets metric. https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1046966/f957408bbdd4d388/

Well yes, but the vast majority of changes (~95%, by either changes or lines) seem to be from contributors supported by employers.

Sure, but there is still "someone" contributing unpaid.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#287

Post by jsiepkes » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

There is also 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.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#288

Post by creatonez » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:10 AM UTC

spicymaki wrote: post #219

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

Except... the FSF is actually on the extreme opposite end of this issue. They do formal copyright assignment from the GNU contributors to the FSF. This way, they have a centralized final say on enforcement that is resistant to copyleft trolls, but it ultimately allows the theoretical possibility of a rugpull.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#289

Post by drnick1 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:20 AM UTC

peterashford wrote: post #252

victormy wrote: post #233

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:…

"open source projects eventually need a path to monetization" Why?

The beauty of open source is that there are all kinds of reasons for contributing to it, and all are valid. For some, it's just a hobby. For others, like Valve, it's a means of building their own platform. Hardware manufacturers like AMD (and increasingly Nvidia) contribute drivers to the kernel because they want to sell hardware.

Re: MinIO is now in maintenance-mode

#290

Post by EgoIncarnate » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 7:43 AM UTC

woooooo wrote: post #272

EgoIncarnate wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_REQU...

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.

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.