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MinIO repository is no longer maintained

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Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#231
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is quick to assert rights granted by the license terms and fast to say the authors should have chosen a better license from the start in case the license doesnt fit the current situation. License terms don't end there. There is a no warranty clause too in almost every open source license and it is as important as the other parts of the license. There is no promise or guarantees for updates or future versions…

They're not saying they violated the license, they're saying they're assholes. It may not be illegal to say you'll do something for free and then not do it, but it's assholish, especially if you said it to gain customers.

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Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the contract to return the shopping cart to the corral?

Your analogy doesn't make sense. You are getting benefits from using the shopping cart and you bring back as it's expected as part of the exchange. You bring the cart back to where you took which is a low effort commitment entirely proportional to what you got from it. Free software developers are gifting you something. Expecting indefinite free work is not mutual respect. That's entitlement. The common is still ther…

MinIO accepted contributions from people outside the company who did work on it for free, usually because they expected that minio would keep the software open source.

Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#233
post #150

I successfully migrated from MinIO to Ceph, which I highly recommend. Along the way, I tested SeaweedFS, which looked promising. However, I ran into a strange bug, and after diagnosing it with the help of Claude, I realized the codebase was vibe-coded and riddled with a staggering number of structural errors. In my opinion, SeaweedFS should absolutely not be used for anything beyond testing — otherwise you're almost…

Ceph is the OG. Every now and then different attempts to replace it pop up, work well for some use cases, and then realise how hard the actual problem they are trying to solve is. Ceph always wins in the end.

Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#234
Anyone interested in keeping access should fork this open source repository now and make a local archived copy. That way when this organization deletes this repository there can still be access to this open source code.

In the Ruby on Rails space, we had this happen recently with the prawn_plus Gem where the original author yanked all published copies and deleted the GitHub repository.

On GitHub, when a private repo is deleted forks are deleted. But for public repos, the policy is different. See https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-....

This is the latest of a sunset trap set for those of us who use Minio for local testing but not production use.

Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#235
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is quick to assert rights granted by the license terms and fast to say the authors should have chosen a better license from the start in case the license doesnt fit the current situation. License terms don't end there. There is a no warranty clause too in almost every open source license and it is as important as the other parts of the license. There is no promise or guarantees for updates or future versions…

They're not saying they violated the license, they're saying they're assholes. It may not be illegal to say you'll do something for free and then not do it, but it's assholish, especially if you said it to gain customers.

I'm noticing this argument a lot these days, and I think it stems from something I can't define - "soft" vs. "hard" or maybe "high-trust" vs "low-trust".

I always warned people that if they "buy" digital things (music, movies) it's only a license, and can be taken away. And people intellectually understand that, but don't think it'll really happen. And then years go by, and it does, and then there's outrage when Amazon changes Roald Dahl's books, or they snatch 1984 right off your kindle after you bought it.

So there's a gap between what is "allowed" and what is "expected". I find this everywhere in polite society.

Was just talking to a new engineer on my team, and he had merged some PRs, but ignored comments from reviewers. And I asked him about that, and he said "Well, they didn't block the PR with Request Changes, so I'm free to merge." So I explained that folks won't necessarily block the PR, even though they expect a response to their questions. Yes, you are allowed to merge the PR, but you'll still want to engage with the review comments.

I view open source the same way. When a company offers open source code to the community, releasing updates regularly, they are indeed allowed to just stop doing that. It's not illegal, and no one is entitled to more effort from them. But at the same time, they would be expected to engage responsibly with the community, knowing that other companies and individuals have integrated their offering, and would be left stranded. I think that's the sentiment here: you're stranding your users, and you know it. Good companies provide a nice offramp when this happens.

Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#236
First off, I don't think there is anything wrong with MinIO closing down its open source. There are simply too many people globally who use open source without being willing to pay for it. I started testing various alternatives a few months ago, and I still believe RustFS will emerge as the winner after MinIO's exit. I evaluated Garage, SeaweedFS, Ceph, and RustFS. Here are my conclusions:

1. RustFS and SeaweedFS are the fastest in the object storage field.

2. The installation for Garage and SeaweedFS is more complex compared to RustFS.

3. The RustFS console is the most convenient and user-friendly.

4. Ceph is too difficult to use; I wouldn't dare deploy it without a deep understanding of the source code.

Although many people criticize RustFS, suggesting its CLA might be "bait," I don't think such a requirement is excessive for open source software, as it helps mitigate their own legal risks.

Furthermore, Milvus gave RustFS a very high official evaluation. Based on technical benchmarks and other aspects, I believe RustFS will ultimately win.

https://milvus.io/blog/evaluating-rustfs-as-a-viable-s3-comp...

Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#238
post #27

I ran a moderately large opensource service and my chronic back pain was cured the day I stopped maintaining the project. Working for free is not fun. Having a paid offering with a free community version is not fun. Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun. I learnt this the hard way and I guess the MinIO team learnt this as well.

There's nothing wrong at all with charging for your product. What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until people undertake a lot of work to integrate your product into their infrastructure, and then doing a bait-and-switch. Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision. Or, if…

Almost every FOSS license has a warranty disclaimer. You should have always been taking them seriously. They are there for a reason.

Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#239
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong at all with charging for your product. What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until people undertake a lot of work to integrate your product into their infrastructure, and then doing a bait-and-switch. Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision. Or, if…

> then doing a bait-and-switch FOSS is not a moral contract. People working for free owe nothing to no one. You got what's on the tin - the code is as open source once they stop as when they started. The underlying assumption of your message is that you are somehow entitled to their continued labour which is absolutely not the case.

Everyone is keying on forced free labor, but that's not really the proposed solution when an open-source project ends. The fact that it ends is a given, the question then is what to do about all the users. Providing an offramp (migration tools that move to another solution that's similar, or even just suggested other solutions, even including your own commercial offering) before closing up shop seems like a decent thing to do.

Re: MinIO repository is no longer maintained

#240
What is the best alternative that can run as a Docker image that mimics AWS S3 to enable local only testing without any external cloud connections?

For me, my only use for Minio was to simulate AWS S3 in docker compose so that my applications were fully testable locally. I never used it it production or as a middle ware. It has not sat well with me to use alternative strategies like Ruby on Rails' local file storage for testing as it behaves differently than when the app is deployed. And using actual cloud services creates its own hurdles of either credential sharing among developers and gets rid of the "docker magic" of being to run a single set up script and be up and running to change code and run the full test suite.

My use case is any developer on the team can do a Git clone and run the set up script and then be fully up and running within minutes locally without any special configuration on their part.

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