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THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED.

Alternatives:

  • AIStor Free — Full-featured, standalone edition for community use (free license)
  • AIStor Enterprise — Distributed edition with commercial support

Slack Docker Pulls license

MinIO

MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage solution released under the GNU AGPL v3.0 license. Designed for speed and scalability, it powers AI/ML, analytics, and data-intensive workloads with industry-leading performance.

  • S3 API Compatible – Seamless integration with existing S3 tools
  • Built for AI & Analytics – Optimized for large-scale data pipelines
  • High Performance – Ideal for demanding storage workloads.

This README provides instructions for building MinIO from source and deploying onto baremetal hardware. Use the MinIO Documentation project to build and host a local copy of the documentation.

We designed MinIO as Open Source software for the Open Source software community. We encourage the community to remix, redesign, and reshare MinIO under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.

All usage of MinIO in your application stack requires validation against AGPLv3 obligations, which include but are not limited to the release of modified code to the community from which you have benefited. Any commercial/proprietary usage of the AGPLv3 software, including repackaging or reselling services/features, is done at your own risk.

The AGPLv3 provides no obligation by any party to support, maintain, or warranty the original or any modified work. All support is provided on a best-effort basis through Github and our Slack channel, and any member of the community is welcome to contribute and assist others in their usage of the software.

MinIO AIStor includes enterprise-grade support and licensing for workloads which require commercial or proprietary usage and production-level SLA/SLO-backed support. For more information, reach out for a quote.

Important: The MinIO community edition is now distributed as source code only. We will no longer provide pre-compiled binary releases for the community version.

To use MinIO community edition, you have two options:

  1. Install from source using go install github.com/minio/minio@latest (recommended)
  2. Build a Docker image from the provided Dockerfile

See the sections below for detailed instructions on each method.

Historical pre-compiled binary releases remain available for reference but are no longer maintained:

These legacy binaries will not receive updates. We strongly recommend using source builds for access to the latest features, bug fixes, and security updates.

Use the following commands to compile and run a standalone MinIO server from source. If you do not have a working Golang environment, please follow How to install Golang. Minimum version required is go1.24

go install github.com/minio/minio@latest

You can alternatively run go build and use the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables to control the OS and architecture target. For example:

env GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm64 go build

Start MinIO by running minio server PATH where PATH is any empty folder on your local filesystem.

The MinIO deployment starts using default root credentials minioadmin:minioadmin. You can test the deployment using the MinIO Console, an embedded web-based object browser built into MinIO Server. Point a web browser running on the host machine to http://127.0.0.1:9000 and log in with the root credentials. You can use the Browser to create buckets, upload objects, and browse the contents of the MinIO server.

You can also connect using any S3-compatible tool, such as the MinIO Client mc commandline tool:

mc alias set local http://localhost:9000 minioadmin minioadmin
mc admin info local

See Test using MinIO Client mc for more information on using the mc commandline tool. For application developers, see https://docs.min.io/enterprise/aistor-object-store/developers/sdk/ to view MinIO SDKs for supported languages.

Note

Production environments using compiled-from-source MinIO binaries do so at their own risk. The AGPLv3 license provides no warranties nor liabilities for any such usage.

You can use the docker build . command to build a Docker image on your local host machine. You must first build MinIO and ensure the minio binary exists in the project root.

The following command builds the Docker image using the default Dockerfile in the root project directory with the repository and image tag myminio:minio

docker build -t myminio:minio .

Use docker image ls to confirm the image exists in your local repository. You can run the server using standard Docker invocation:

docker run -p 9000:9000 -p 9001:9001 myminio:minio server /tmp/minio --console-address :9001

Complete documentation for building Docker containers, managing custom images, or loading images into orchestration platforms is out of scope for this documentation. You can modify the Dockerfile and dockerscripts/docker-entrypoint.sh as-needed to reflect your specific image requirements.

See the MinIO Container documentation for more guidance on running MinIO within a Container image.

There are two paths for installing MinIO onto Kubernetes infrastructure:

See the MinIO Documentation for guidance on deploying using the Operator. The Community Helm chart has instructions in the folder-level README.

MinIO Server comes with an embedded web based object browser. Point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:9000 to ensure your server has started successfully.

Note

MinIO runs console on random port by default, if you wish to choose a specific port use --console-address to pick a specific interface and port.

mc provides a modern alternative to UNIX commands like ls, cat, cp, mirror, diff etc. It supports filesystems and Amazon S3 compatible cloud storage services.

The following commands set a local alias, validate the server information, create a bucket, copy data to that bucket, and list the contents of the bucket.

mc alias set local http://localhost:9000 minioadmin minioadmin
mc admin info
mc mb data
mc cp ~/Downloads/mydata data/
mc ls data/

Follow the MinIO Client Quickstart Guide for further instructions.

Please follow MinIO Contributor's Guide for guidance on making new contributions to the repository.


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Comments

  • By victormy 2026-02-1316:0510 reply

    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...

    • By redskyluan 2026-02-1316:543 reply 

        Maintainer of Milvus here. A few thoughts from someone who lives this every day:

  1. The free user problem is real, and AI makes it worse. We serve a massive community of free Milvus users — and we're grateful for them, they make the project what it is. But we also feel the tension MinIO is describing. You invest serious engineering effort into stability and bug fixes, and most users will never become paying customers. In the AI era this ratio only gets harder — copy with AI becomes easier than ever

  2. We need better object storage options. As a heavy consumer of object storage, Milvus needs a reliable, performant, and truly open foundation. RustFS is a solid candidate — we've been evaluating it seriously. But we'd love to see more good options emerge. If the ecosystem can't meet our needs long-term, we may have to invest in building our own.

  3. Open source licensing deserves a serious conversation. The Apache 2.0 / Hadoop-era model served us well, but cracks are showing. Cloud vendors and AI companies consume enormous amounts of open-source infrastructure, and the incentives to contribute back are weaker than ever. I don't think the answer is closing the source — but I also don't think "hope enterprises pay for support" scales forever. We need the community to have an honest conversation about what sustainable open source looks like in the AI era. MinIO's move is a symptom worth paying attention to.

      • By hajile 2026-02-1318:421 reply

        GPL for open source and commercial license for the enterprise lawyers.

        Unfortunately, a majority seems to hate GPL these days even though it prevents most of the worst corporate behaviors.

        • By kuschku 2026-02-1319:561 reply

          Minio was AGPL, which was a perfectly fine tradeoff IMO. But apparently that wasn't good enough.

          • By yifanl 2026-02-1319:59

            AGPL doesn't help when you want to kill your free offering to move people onto the paid tier. But quite frankly, that isn't a problem GPL is meant to solve.

      • By elvinagy 2026-02-1521:21

        Elvin here from RustFS. Appreciate the feedback, especially coming from the Milvus team—we’ve followed your work for a long time.

        You’re right about the "tension" in OSS. That’s exactly why we are pledging to keeping the RustFS core engine permanently open-source. We want to provide the solid, open foundation you mentioned so that teams like yours don't feel forced to build and maintain a storage layer from scratch.

        On the sustainability question—you've described the challenge better than most. We're still figuring out the right model, and I don't think anyone has a perfect answer yet. What we do know is that we're building something technically excellent first, and we're committed to doing it in a way that keeps the core open.

      • By victormy 2026-02-1317:03

        Huge thanks for your contributions to the open-source world! Milvus is an incredibly cool product and a staple in my daily stack.

        It’s been amazing to watch Milvus grow from its roots in China to gaining global trust and major VC backing. You've really nailed the commercialization, open-source governance, and international credibility aspects.

        Regarding RustFS, I think that—much like Milvus in the early days—it just needs time to earn global trust. With storage and databases, trust is built over years; users are naturally hesitant to do large-scale replacements without that long track record.

        Haha, maybe Milvus should just acquire RustFS? That would certainly make us feel a lot safer using it!

    • By gunapologist99 2026-02-1317:023 reply

      Garage installation is easy.

      1. Download or build the single binary into your system (install like `/usr/local/sbin/garage`)

      2. Create a file `/etc/garage.toml`:

        metadata_dir = "/data/garage/meta"
  data_dir = "/data/garage/data"
  db_engine = "sqlite"
  
  replication_factor = 1
  
  rpc_bind_addr = "[::]:3901"
  rpc_public_addr = "127.0.0.1:3901"
  rpc_secret = "[your rpc secret]"
  
  [s3_api]
  s3_region = "garage"
  api_bind_addr = "[::]:3900"
  root_domain = ".s3.garage.localhost"
  
  [s3_web]
  bind_addr = "[::]:3902"
  root_domain = ".web.garage.localhost"
  index = "index.html"
  
  [k2v_api]
  api_bind_addr = "[::]:3904"
  
  [admin]
  api_bind_addr = "[::]:3903"
  admin_token = "woG4Czw6957vNTXNfLABdCzI13NTP94M+qWENXUBThw="
  metrics_token = "3dRhgCRQQSxfplmYD+g1UTEZWT9qJBIsI56jDFy0VQU="
      3. Start it with `garage server` or just have an AI write an init script or unit file for you. (You can pkill -f /usr/local/sbin/garage to shut it down.)

      Also, NVIDIA has a phenomenal S3 compatible system that nobody seems to know about named AIStore: https://aistore.nvidia.com/ It's a bit more complex, but very powerful and fast (faster than MinIO - slightly less space efficient than MinIO because it maintains a complete copy of an object on a single node so that the object doesn't have to be reconstituted as it would on MinIO.) It also can be a proxy in front of other S3 systems, including AWS S3 or GCS etc and offer a single unified namespace to your clients.

      IMO, Seaweedfs is still too much of a personal project, it's fast for small files, but keep good and frequent backups in a different system if you choose it.

      I personally will avoid RustFS. Even if it was totally amazing, the Contributor License Agreement makes me feel like we're getting into the whole Minio rug-pull situation all over again, and you know what they say about doing the same thing and expecting a different result..

      • By pellepelster 2026-02-1317:121 reply

        If you are on Hetzner, I created a ready to use Terraform module that spins up a single node GarageFs server https://pellepelster.github.io/solidblocks/hetzner/web-s3-do...

        • By zenoprax 2026-02-1317:53

          As someone about to learn the basics of Terraform, with an interest in geo-distributed storage, and with some Hetzner credit sitting idle... I came across the perfect comment this morning.

          I might extend this with ZeroFS too.

      • By victormy 2026-02-1317:071 reply

        Garage is indeed an excellent project, but I think it has a few drawbacks compared to the alternatives: Metadata Backend: It relies on SQLite. I have concerns about how well this scales or handles high concurrency with massive datasets. Admin UI: The console is still not very user-friendly/polished. Deployment Complexity: You are required to configure a "layout" (regions/zones) to get started, whereas MinIO doesn't force this concept on you for simple setups. Design Philosophy: While Garage is fantastic for edge/geo-distributed use cases, I feel its overall design still lags behind MinIO and RustFS. There is a higher barrier to entry because you have to learn specific Garage concepts just to get it running.

      • By __turbobrew__ 2026-02-145:43

        Regarding aistore the recommended prod configuration is kubernetes, which brings in a huge amount of complexity. Also, one person (Alex Aizman) has about half of the total commits in the project, so it seems like the bus factor is 1.

        I could see running Aistore in single binary mode for small deployments, but for anything large and production grade I would not touch Aistore. Ceph is going to be the better option IMO, it is a truly collaborative open source project developed by multiple companies with a long track record.

    • By hintymad 2026-02-1319:50

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

      I'm not sure if SeaweedFS is comparable. It's based on Facebook's Haystack design, which is used to address a very specific use case: minimizing the IOs, in particular the metadata lookup, for accessing individual objects. This leads to many trade-offs. For instance, its main unit of operations is on volumes. Data is appended to a volume. Erasure coding is done per volume. Updates are done at volume level, and etc.

      On the other hand, a general object store goes beyond needle-in-a-haystack type of operations. In particular, people use an object store as the backend for analytics, which requires high-throughput scans.

    • By dathinab 2026-02-1317:271 reply

      > 4. Ceph [...]

      MinIO was more for the "mini" use case (or more like "anything not large scale", with a very broad definition of large scale). Here "works out of the box" is paramount.

      And Ceph is more for the maxi use case. Here in depth fine tuning, highly complex setups, distributed setups and similar are the norm. Hence out of the box small scale setup experience is bearly relevant.

      So they really don't fill out the same space, even through their functionality overlaps.

      • By __turbobrew__ 2026-02-145:46

        Definitely, ceph shines in the 1-100 petabyte range whereas minio excelled in the 0-1 petabyte range.

    • By singhrac 2026-02-1317:101 reply

      I want to like RustFS, but it feels like there's so much marketing attached to the software it turns me off a little. Even a little rocket emoji and benchmark in the Github about page. Sometimes less is more. Look at the ty Github home page - 1 benchmark on the main page, the description is just "An extremely fast Python type checker and language server, written in Rust.".

      • By victormy 2026-02-1317:39

        Haha, +1. I really like RustFS as a product, but the marketing fluff and documentation put me off too. It reads like non-native speakers relying heavily on AI, which explains a lot. Honestly, they really need to bring in some native English speakers to overhaul the docs. The current vibe just doesn't land well with a US audience.

    • By bityard 2026-02-1316:242 reply

      > too many people globally who use open source without being willing to pay for it.

      That's an odd take... open source is a software licensing model, not a business model.

      Unless you have some knowledge that I don't, MinIO never asked for nor accepted donations from users of their open source offerings. All of their funding came from sales and support of their enterprise products, not their open source one. They are shutting down their own contributions to the open source code in order to focus on their closed enterprise products, not due to lack of community engagement or (as already mentioned) community funding.

      • By devsda 2026-02-1317:201 reply

        > That's an odd take... open source is a software licensing model, not a business model.

        Yes, open-source is a software license model, not a business model. It is also not a software support model.

        This change is them essentially declaring that MinIO is EOL and will not have any further updates.

        For comparison, Windows 10 which is a paid software released in the same year as first minio release i.e. 2015 is already EOL.

        • By NetMageSCW 2026-02-1323:481 reply

          >This change is them essentially declaring that MinIO is EOL and will not have any further updates.

          Just fork it!

          • By victormy 2026-02-141:521 reply

            Simply forking it won't work. The legal risks have been well-documented. Under their AGPL + Commercial model, the moment your fork gets too popular, MinIO can just shut you down. This is exactly why the smart money and talent have already moved on to systems like RustFS, SeaweedFS, and Garage instead of trying to maintain a doomed fork.

            • By true_religion 2026-02-1516:39

              The only risk is if you’re trying to bootstrap your competitors with their open source contribution, and have a paid private integrations.

              AGPL means you cannot do this. This is less of a risk, than it is the explicit intention of the Licence.

      • By victormy 2026-02-1316:341 reply

        I respectfully disagree with the notion that open source is strictly a licensing model and not a business model. For an open-source project to achieve long-term reliability and growth, it must be backed by a sustainable commercial engine. History has shown that simply donating a project to a foundation (like Apache or CNCF) isn't a silver bullet; many projects under those umbrellas still struggle to find the resources they need to thrive. The ideal path—and the best outcome for users globally—is a "middle way" where: The software remains open and maintained. The core team has a viable way to survive and fund development. Open code ensures security, transparency, and a trustworthy software supply chain. However, the way MinIO has handled this transition is, in my view, the most disappointing approach possible. It creates a significant trust gap. When a company pivots this way, users are left wondering about the integrity of the code—whether it’s the potential for "backdoors" or undisclosed data transmission. I hope to see other open-source object storage projects mature quickly to provide a truly transparent and reliable alternative.

        • By gunapologist99 2026-02-1317:091 reply

          > For an open-source project to achieve long-term reliability and growth, it must be backed by a sustainable commercial engine

          You mean like Linux, Python, PostgreSQL, Apache HTTP Server, Node.js, MariaDB, GNU Bash, GNU Coreutils, SQLite, VLC, LibreOffice, OpenSSH?

          • By victormy 2026-02-1317:452 reply

            Actually, Linux reinforces my point. It isn't powered solely by volunteers; it thrives because the world's largest corporations (Intel, Google, Red Hat, etc.) foot the bill. The Linux Foundation is massively funded by corporate members, and most kernel contributors are paid engineers. Without that commercial engine, Linux would not have the dominance it does today. Even OpenAI had to pivot away from its original non-profit, open principles to survive and scale. There is nothing wrong with making money while sustaining open source. The problem is MinIO's specific approach. Instead of a symbiotic relationship, they treated the community as free QA testers and marketing pawns, only to pull up the ladder later. That’s a "bait-and-switch," not a sustainable business model.

            • By overfeed 2026-02-1318:12

              > Actually, Linux reinforces my point.

              Not many open source projects are Linux-sized. Linux is worth billions of dollars and enabled Google and Redhat to exist, so they can give back millions, without compulsion, and in a self-interested way.

              Random library maintainer dude should not expect their (very replaceable) library to print money. The cool open source tool/utility could be a 10-person company, maybe 100 tops, but people see dollar-signs in their eyes based on number of installs/GitHub stars, and get VC funding to take a swing for billions in ARR.

              I remember when (small scale) open source was about scratching your own itch without making it a startup via user-coercion. It feels like the 'Open source as a growth-hack" has metastasized into "Now that they are hooked, entire user base is morally obligated to give me money". I would have no issue if a project included this before it gets popular - but that may prevent popular adoption. So it rubs me the wrong way when folk want to have their cake and eat it.

            • By bityard 2026-02-1320:211 reply

              > Even OpenAI had to pivot away from its original non-profit, open principles to survive and scale.

              Uh, no, OpenAI didn't pivot from being open in order to survive.

              They survived for 7 years before ChatGPT was released. When it was, they pivoted the _instant_ it became obvious that AI was about to be a trillion-dollar industry and they weren't going to miss the boat of commercialization. Yachts don't buy themselves, you know!

              • By mulmen 2026-02-141:39

                > Yachts don't buy themselves, you know!

                No but open source rugpulls do!

    • By yjftsjthsd-h 2026-02-1317:041 reply

      > 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.

      What legal risks does it help mitigate?

      • By everfrustrated 2026-02-1320:562 reply

        RustFS has rug-pull written all over it. You can bookmark this comment for the future. 100% guaranteed it will happen. Only question is when.

        • By elvinagy 2026-02-1515:531 reply

          I’m Elvin from the RustFS team in the U.S. Thanks for pointing out the issues with our initial CLA. We realized the original wording was overreaching and created a lot of distrust about the project's future.

          We’ve officially updated the CLA to a standard License Grant model. Under these new terms, you retain full ownership of your contributions, and only grant us a non-exclusive license to use them. You can check the updated CLA here: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs/blob/main/CLA.md.

          More importantly, the RustFS team is officially pledging to keep our core repository permanently open-source. We are committed to an open-core engine for the long term, not a "bait and switch."

          • By yourpassword1 2026-02-1516:20

            It is better, but FYI for context:

              Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to RustFS and to recipients of software distributed by RustFS a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works under any license, including proprietary or commercial licenses and open-source licenses, at RustFS's sole discretion.

        • By victormy 2026-02-142:002 reply

          Lol, maybe you should fund the RustFS team yourself or sponsor a top-tier legal team for them. If you can help them rewrite their CLAs and guarantee they'll never face any IP risks down the road, then sure, you're 100% right.

          • By everfrustrated 2026-02-142:241 reply

            Interesting that all your comments are shilling for RustFS

            • By victormy 2026-02-156:46

              Fair point on the frequency of my comments, but there’s a nuance to the CLA discussion. Even with Apache 2.0, many major projects (like those under the CNCF or Apache Foundation) require a CLA to ensure the project has the legal right to distribute the code indefinitely.

              My focus on the CLA is about building a solid foundation for RustFS so it doesn't face the licensing "re-branding" drama we've seen with other storage projects recently. It’s about long-term stability for the community, not just a marketing ploy.

          • By yjftsjthsd-h 2026-02-143:461 reply

            And again - what IP risk does a CLA solve, that a DCO wouldn't? Like, IANAL so I certainly could be missing something, but I'd like to hear what it might be.

            • By victormy 2026-02-156:51

              I’m also maintaining an open-source project and have spent significant time drafting our CLA, so I completely understand the concerns surrounding them.

              While DCO is excellent for tracking provenance, we opted for a CLA primarily to address explicit patent grants and sublicensing rights—areas where a standard DCO often lacks the comprehensive legal coverage that a formal agreement provides.

              It’s a common and sustainable practice in the industry to keep the core code open-source while developing enterprise features. Without a solid CLA in place, a project faces massive legal hurdles later on—whether that’s for future commercialization or even the eventual donation of the project to an open-source foundation like the CNCF or Apache Foundation. We're just trying to ensure long-term legal clarity for everyone involved.

    • By kyyol 2026-02-140:132 reply

      I run Ceph in my k8s cluster (using rook) -- 4 nodes, 2x 4TB enterprise SSDs on each node. It's been pretty bulletproof; took some time to set up and familiarize with Ceph but now it's simple to operate.

      Claude Code is amazing at managing Ceph, restoring, fixing CRUSH maps, etc. It's got all the Ceph motions down to a tee.

      With the tools at our disposal nowadays, saying "I wouldn't dare deploy it without a deep understanding of the source code" seems like an overexaggeration!

      I encourage folks to try out Ceph if it supports their usecase.

      • By sgarland 2026-02-1413:33

        Considering the hallucinations I routinely deal with about databases, there isn’t a chance in hell I would trust an LLM to manage my storage for me.

      • By __turbobrew__ 2026-02-145:49

        If you setup ceph correctly (multiple failure domains, correct replication rules across failure domains, monitors spread across failure domain, osds are not force purged) it is actually pretty hard to break it. Rook helps a lot too as rook makes it easier to set up ceph correctly.

    • By meotimdihia 2026-02-145:02

      It looks like this article is biased. It only benchmarked RustFS.

      In my experience, SeaweedFS has at least 3–5× better performance than MinIO. I used MinIO to host 100 TB of images to serve millions of users daily.

    • By jjm 2026-02-1316:381 reply

      Gosh, Ceph what a pita. Never again LOL. I wouldn't even want an LLM to suffer working on it.

      • By victormy 2026-02-1316:44

        Haha, totally get you! I think if you forced an LLM to manage a large-scale Ceph cluster, it would probably start hallucinating about retirement.

  • By muragekibicho 2026-02-139:0913 reply

    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.

    • By bojangleslover 2026-02-1310:036 reply

      Completely different situations. None of the MinIO team worked for free. MinIO is a COSS company (commercial open source software). They give a basic version of it away for free hoping that some people, usually at companies, will want to pay for the premium features. MinIO going closed source is a business decision and there is nothing wrong with that.

      I highly recommend SeaweedFS. I used it in production for a long time before partnering with Wasabi. We still have SeaweedFS for a scorching hot, 1GiB/s colocated object storage, but Wasabi is our bread and butter object storage now.

      • By Ensorceled 2026-02-1313:112 reply

        > > 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.

        > Completely different situations. None of the MinIO team worked for free. MinIO is a COSS company (commercial open source software).

        MinIO is dealing with two out of the three issues, and the company is partially providing work for free, how is that "completely different"?

        • By mbreese 2026-02-1313:171 reply

          The MinIO business model was a freemium model (well, Open Source + commercial support, which is slightly different). They used the free OSS version to drive demand for the commercially licensed version. It’s not like they had a free community version with users they needed to support thrust upon them — this was their plan. They weren’t volunteers.

          You could argue that they got to the point where the benefit wasn’t worth the cost, but this was their business model. They would not have gotten to the point where the could have a commercial-only operation without the adoption and demand generated from the OSS version.

          Running a successful OSS project is often a thankless job. Thanks for doing it. But this isn’t that.

          • By Ensorceled 2026-02-1313:472 reply

            > Running a successful OSS project is often a thankless job. Thanks for doing it. But this isn’t that.

            No, even if you are being paid, it's a thankless, painful job to deal with demanding, entitled free users. It's worse if you are not being paid, but I'm not sure why you are asserting dealing with bullshit is just peachy if you are being paid.

            • By merb 2026-02-1315:252 reply

              If that is the case why did minio start with the open source version? If there were only downsides? Sounds like stupid business plan

              • By throwaway894345 2026-02-1316:31

                They wanted adoption and a funnel into their paid offering. They were looking out for their own self-interest, which is perfectly fine; however, it’s very different from the framing many are giving in this thread of a saintly company doing thankless charity work for evil homelab users.

              • By Ensorceled 2026-02-1317:311 reply

                Where did I say there were only downsides? There are definitely upsides to this business model, I'm just refuting the idea that because there are for profit motives the downsides go away.

                I hate when people mistreat the people that provide services to them: doesn't matter if it's a volunteer, underpaid waitress or well paid computer programmer. The mistreatment doesn't become "ok" because the person being mistreated is paid.

                • By merb 2026-02-1418:011 reply

                  I doubt that minio pulled the open source version because they were mistreated. Really yeah there are some projects where this is a problem, but it’s mostly because the project only has a single maintainer.

                  People are angry about minio , but that’s because of their rugpull.

                  • By yencabulator 2026-02-1523:50

                    The minio people did a lot of questionable things even before the rugpull. They tried to claim AGPL infects software over the network, on a previous version of https://min.io/compliance

                    > Combining MinIO software as part of a larger software stack triggers your GNU AGPL v3 obligations. The method of combining does not matter. When MinIO is linked to a larger software stack in any form, including statically, dynamically, pipes, or containerized and invoked remotely, the AGPL v3 applies to your use. What triggers the AGPL v3 obligations is the exchanging data between the larger stack and MinIO.

            • By ktosobcy 2026-02-1318:34

              > No, even if you are being paid, it's a thankless, painful job to deal with demanding, entitled free users.

              So… aren't they providing (paid) support? same thing…

              Absurd comparison.

        • By throwaway894345 2026-02-1316:27

          “I don’t want to support free users” is completely different than “we’re going all-in on AI, so we’re killing our previous product for both open source and commercial users and replacing it with a new one”

      • By hobofan 2026-02-1310:191 reply

        I can also highly recommend SeaweedFS for development purposes, where you want to test general behaviour when using S3-compatible storage. That's what I mainly used MinIO before, and SeaweedFS, especially with their new `weed mini` command that runs all the services together in one process is a great replacement for local development and CI purposes.

        • By dizhn 2026-02-1312:561 reply

          I've been using rustfs for some very light local development and it looks.. fine: )

          • By antonvs 2026-02-1315:411 reply

            Ironically rustfs.com is currently failing to load on Firefox, with 'Uncaught TypeError: can't access property "enable", s is null'. They shoulda used a statically checked language for their website...

            • By victormy 2026-02-1316:511 reply

              My Firefox access is working fine. The version is 147.0.3 (aarch64)

              • By antonvs 2026-02-1317:211 reply

                I'm running Firefox 145.0.2 on amd64.

                It seems like the issue may be that I have WebGL disabled. The console includes messages like "Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL creation failed: * AllowWebgl2:false restricts context creation on this system."

                Oh well, guess I can't use rustfs :}

                • By seg_lol 2026-02-1322:051 reply

                  I just disabled webgl on my firefox and it worked fine.

                  Your problems could be caused by a whiny fan. Here is the source https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs

                  • By antonvs 2026-02-154:271 reply

                    I like the way multiple people feel the need to defend a buggy website with their anecdotal n=1 evidence.

                    It’s not difficult to make a website that works for everyone.

                    • By dizhn 2026-02-1611:39

                      Oh is it the website that's failing? I kind of assumed it was the web UI for the software. Workarounds sort of kind of make sense there.. Maybe.. But the website. That's bad.

      • By codegladiator 2026-02-1310:13

        can vouch for SeaweedFS, been using it since the time it was called weedfs and my managers were like are you sure you really want to use that ?

      • By inumedia 2026-02-1714:09

        Not seeing any one else comment about it, but I would caution against relying on Wasabi primarily. They actively and silently corrupted a lot of my data and still billed me for it. You'll just start seeing random 500s when trying to get data down from your bucket and it's just gone, no recovery, but it still counts as stored data so you're still paying for it.

      • By phoronixrly 2026-02-1313:371 reply

        Nothing wrong? Does minio grant the basic freedoms of being able to run the software, study it, change it, and distribute it?

        Did minio create the impression to its contributors that it will continue being FLOSS?

        • By ufocia 2026-02-1313:491 reply

          Yes the software is under AGPL. Go forth and forkify.

          The choice of AGPL tells you that they wanted to be the only commercial source of the software from the beginning.

          • By phoronixrly 2026-02-1314:144 reply

            > the software is under AGPL. Go forth and forkify.

            No, what was minio is now aistor, a closed-source proprietary software. Tell me how to fork it and I will.

            > they wanted to be the only commercial source of the software

            The choice of AGPL tells me nothing more than what is stated in the license. And I definitely don't intend to close the source of any of my AGPL-licensed projects.

            • By regularfry 2026-02-1315:591 reply

              > Tell me how to fork it and I will.

              https://github.com/minio/minio/fork

              The fact that new versions aren't available does nothing to stop you from forking versions that are. Or were - they'll be available somewhere, especially if it got packaged for OS distribution.

              • By phoronixrly 2026-02-142:181 reply

                The only packages I find of aistor, are binary packages. Not only that, the aistor license agreement explicitly states the following:

                > You may not modify, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or create derivative works of the Software.

                • By regularfry 2026-02-148:21

                  Do you consider this a breach of the AGPL?

            • By tracker1 2026-02-1317:161 reply

              So fork the last minio, and work from there... nobody is stopping you.

              • By phoronixrly 2026-02-142:201 reply

                aistor is proprietary software[1]. Having an old version of your software be open source does not make your software open-source. Why does this need an explanation?

                [1] https://www.min.io/legal/aistor-free-agreement

                • By tracker1 2026-02-1415:221 reply

                  You aren't entitled to the product of someone else's work even if they gave away older versions of that work... What is so hard for you to understand about that?

                  • By phoronixrly 2026-02-163:17

                    No, I no longer am, because aistor/minio decided they no longer respect their users' freedom. It's as simple as that -- aistor is unethical and borders on malware.

            • By 0x457 2026-02-1718:27

              > And I definitely don't intend to close the source of any of my AGPL-licensed projects.

              If a commercial company has "core" version under AGPL, it usually means their free version is an extended demo of the commercial product.

      • By sshine 2026-02-1312:401 reply

        Wasabi looks like a service.

        Any recommendation for an in-cluster alternative in production?

        Is that SeaweedFS?

        • By jodrellblank 2026-02-1313:211 reply

          I’ve never heard of SeaweedFS, but Ceph cluster storage system has an S3-compatible layer (Object Gateway).

          It’s used by CERN to make Petabyte-scale storage capable of ingesting data from particle collider experiments and they're now up to 17 clusters and 74PB which speaks to its production stability. Apparently people use it down to 3-host Proxmox virtualisation clusters, in a similar place as VMware VSAN.

          Ceph has been pretty good to us for ~1PB scalable backup storage for many years, except that it’s a non-trivial system administration effort and needs good hardware and networking investment, and my employer wasn't fully backing that commitment. (We’re moving off it to Wasabi for S3 storage). It also leans more towards data integrity than performance, it's great at being massively-parallel and not so rapid at being single thread high-IOPs.

          https://ceph.io/en/users/documentation/

          https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/

          https://indico.cern.ch/event/1337241/contributions/5629430/a...

          • By ranger_danger 2026-02-1314:092 reply

            Ceph is a non-starter for me because you cannot have an existing filesystem on the disk. Previously I used GlusterFS on top of ZFS and made heavy use of gluster's async geo-replication feature to keep two storage arrays in sync that were far away over a slow link. This was done after getting fed up with rsync being so slow and always thrashing the disks having to scan many TBs every day.

            While there is a geo-replication feature for Ceph, I cannot keep using ZFS at the same time, and gluster is no longer developed, so I'm currently looking for an alternative that would work for my use case if anyone knows of a solution.

            • By jodrellblank 2026-02-1316:44

              > "Ceph is a non-starter for me because you cannot have an existing filesystem on the disk. Previously I used GlusterFS on top of ZFS"

              I became a Ceph admin by accident so I wasn't involved in choosing it and I'm not familiar with other things in that space. It's a much larger project than a clustered filesystem; you give it disks and it distributes storage over them, and on top of that you can layer things like the S3 storage layer, its own filesystem (CephFS) or block devices which can be mounted on a Linux server and formatted with a filesystem (including ZFS I guess, but that sounds like a lot of layers).

              > "While there is a geo-replication feature for Ceph"

              Several; the data cluster layer can do it in two ways (stretch clusters and stretch pools), the block device layer can do it in two ways (journal based and snapshot based), the CephFS filesystem layer can do it with snapshot mirroring, and the S3 object layer can do it with multi-site sync.

              I've not used any of them, they all have their trade-offs, and this is the kind of thing I was thinking of when saying it requires more skills and effort. for simple storage requirements, put a traditional SAN, a server with a bunch of disks, or pay a cheap S3 service to deal with it. Only if you have a strong need for scalable clusters, a team with storage/Linux skills, a pressing need to do it yourself, or to use many of its features, would I go in that direction.

              https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/rados/operations/stretch-mod...

              https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/rbd/rbd-mirroring/

              https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/cephfs/cephfs-mirroring/

              https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/radosgw/multisite/

            • By skrtskrt 2026-02-1318:263 reply

              Ceph is a non-starter because you need a team of people managing it constantly

              • By jodrellblank 2026-02-1416:06

                I'm not posting to convince people they should use it, just that it's a really cool piece of open source infrastructure that I think is less well known, and I resepect it. It is very configurable and tunable, has a lot of features, command lines, and things to learn, and that does need people with skills and time.

                That said, it doesn't need constant management; it's excellent at staying up even while damaged. As long as the cluster has enough free space it will rebuild around any hardware failure without human intervention, it doesn't need hot spares; if you plan it carefully then it has no single point of failure. (The original creator introduces the design choice of 'placement groups' and tradeoffs in this video[1]).

                Most of the management time I've spent has been ageing hardware flaking out without actually failing - old disks erroring on read, controllers failing and dropping all the disks temporarily causing tens of seconds of read latency which had knock-on effects, or when we filled it too full and it went read-only. Other management work has been learning my way around it, upgrades, changing the way we use it for different projects, onboarding and offboarding services that use it, all of which will vary with what you actually do with it.

                I've spent less time with VMware VSAN, but VSAN does a lot less, it takes your disks and gives you a VMFS datastore and maybe an iSCSI target. There can't be many alternatives which do what Ceph does, and require less skill and effort, and don't involve paying a vendor to manage it for you and give you a web interface?

                [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmLPbrf-x9g

              • By xnyan 2026-02-1415:01

                That's was not my experience. Deploying and configuring ceph was a nightmare due to the mountain of options and considerations, but once it was deployed, ceph is extremely hands-off and resilient.

              • By BlackLotus89 2026-02-1319:54

                Yeah sure. I manage a ceph cluster (4PB) and have a few other responsibilities at the same time.

                I can tell you that ceph is something I don't need to touch every month. Other things I have to baby more regularly

    • By jbstack 2026-02-139:2614 reply

      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 you haven't done that, do the right thing and continue to stand by what you originally promised.

      • By Someone 2026-02-1312:221 reply

        > 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.

        But FOSS means “this particular set of source files is free to use and modify”. It doesn’t include “and we will forever keep developing and maintaining it forever for free”.

        It’s only different if people, in addition to the FOSS license, promise any further updates will be under the same license and then change course.

        And yes, there is a gray area where such a promise is sort-of implied, but even then, what do you prefer, the developers abandoning the project, or at least having the option of a paid-for version?

        • By ufocia 2026-02-1313:561 reply

          > what do you prefer, the developers abandoning the project, or at least having the option of a paid-for version?

          It's not a binary choice. I prefer the developers releasing the software under a permissive license. I agree that relying on freemium maintenance is naive. The community source lives on, perhaps the community should fork and run with it for the common good absorbing the real costs of maintenance.

          • By plagiarist 2026-02-141:10

            Well, yes, that's the reason to use FOSS. Nobody can fully rug pull. But the worst case is still needing someone to take over on it.

      • By puszczyk 2026-02-1310:401 reply

        > Just be honest since the start

        While I agree with the sentiment, keep in mind that circumstances change over the years. What made sense (and what you've believed in) a few years ago may be different now. This is especially true when it comes to business models.

        • By hirako2000 2026-02-1311:374 reply

          When your product entered mainstream with integration that would yield millions when virtually obliged to get a license is typically what happens.

          When backed by a company there is an ethical obligation to keep, at least maintenance. Of course legally they can do what they wish. It isn't unfair to call it bad practice.

          • By skeledrew 2026-02-1312:411 reply

            There's no way that maintaining something is an ethical obligation, regardless of popularity. There is only legal obligation, for commercial products.

            • By hirako2000 2026-02-1314:003 reply

              If offering a tie in thing supposedly free of charge without warning that would end once it serves a party less profit purpose then yes.

              Ethics are not obligations, they are moral principles. Not having principles doesn't send you to prison that is why it isn't law. It makes you lose moral credit though.

              • By kube-system 2026-02-1315:521 reply

                That is ridiculous. If you buy a sandwich for a homeless person, you do not need to warn them that you won't give them another one tomorrow. If you think generosity is an obligation of slavery, you have your morals backwards.

                However, almost every open source license actually DOES warn that support may end. See the warranty clause.

                https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/LICENSE#L587

                • By hdjrudni 2026-02-1321:281 reply

                  If you give them a free sandwich every day for 500 days.....yeah, you should probably tell them you're not coming tomorrow.

                  • By kube-system 2026-02-142:411 reply

                    Okay, well they did.

                    • By hirako2000 2026-02-1411:37

                      The parallel is what's ridiculous..because of the social understanding. Even if you face a sandwich every day, the offer could end anytime..a one off surely doesn't set expectations.

                      With open source it does. If an indie open sources and get a baby or lose interest, it is understood as fair to suddenly stop maintenance.

                      When a company surfs on the open source wave to get contributions, grow penetration, then smoothly slows maintenance and announces to get a license, that's gaming the open source community.

                      See the numerous cases of popular open source repo where the parent or new parent company took over to gain the user base without any respect for the maintenance if not development aspect: community fork and take over the community.

                      Mariadb, a more recent illustrative example of that is the hashicorp drama that occured when investors decided it was time to gear towards profit at the detriment of the community that largely contributed to the tools.

              • By acdha 2026-02-1314:57

                > If offering a tie in thing supposedly free of charge without warning that would end once it serves a party less profit purpose then yes

                Claiming that you’re entitled to free R&D forever because someone once gave you something of value seems like a great way to ensure that nobody does that again. You got over a decade of development by a skilled team, it’s not exactly beyond the pale that the business climate has changed since then.

              • By PKop 2026-02-1316:59

                Those might be your moral principles, but others reject this nonsense of an obligation to perpetual free labor you think you're entitled to, and don't grant you this moral high ground you assume you have.

          • By rofrol 2026-02-1312:351 reply

            There is no ethical obligation. You just want them to release new work under open source licence.

            • By hirako2000 2026-02-1313:57

              They already had. And for what purpose you think?

          • By salawat 2026-02-1319:07

            That's your first mistake. Thinking any company truly gives a shit about ethics when it negatively impacts what it is they actually want to do.

          • By antonvs 2026-02-1315:49

            > When backed by a company there is an ethical obligation to keep, at least maintenance.

            You're saying that a commercial company has an ethical obligation to do work for you in future, for free? That doesn't follow from any workable ethical system.

      • By devsda 2026-02-1311:351 reply

        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.

        • By direwolf20 2026-02-1311:397 reply

          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.

          • By rofrol 2026-02-1312:321 reply

            They gave code for free, under open source, but you call them assholes if they do not release more code for free. So who is the asshole here? You or them?

            • By direwolf20 2026-02-158:59

              Nestle started a charity to give free baby formula to mothers in African villages. Once they all stopped producing milk, they stopped the charity and made the formula so expensive it was barely affordable.

          • By skeledrew 2026-02-1312:38

            There's no broken promise though. It's the users who decide+assume, on their own going in, that X project is good for their needs and they'll have access to future versions in a way they're comfortable with. The developers just go along with the decision+assumption, and may choose to break it at any point. They'd only be assholes if they'd explicitly promised the project would unconditionally remain Y for perpetuity, which is a bs promise nobody should listen to, cuz life.

          • By kube-system 2026-02-1315:47

            Continued updates is not and never has been a part of FOSS, either implicitly or explicitly, you simply have a misconception. FOSS allows you to change the software. That's what it has always meant.

          • By devsda 2026-02-1312:40

            > say you'll do something for free

            I think this is where the problem/misunderstanding is. There's no "I will do/release" in OSS unless promised explicitly. Every single release/version is "I released this version. You are free to use it". There is no implied promise for future versions.

            Released software is not clawed back. Everyone is free to modify(per license) and/or use the released versions as long as they please.

          • By ufocia 2026-02-1313:591 reply

            Customers are the ones that continue to pay. If they continue to pay they will likely receive maintenance from the devs. If they don't, they are no longer or never have been customers.

            • By ranger_danger 2026-02-1314:163 reply

              It would be interesting to see if there could be a sustainable OSS model where customers are required to pay for the product, and that was the only way to get support for it as well.

              Even if the source was always provided (and even if it were GPL), any bug reports/support requests etc. would be limited to paying customers.

              I realize there is already a similar model where the product/source itself is always free and then they have a company behind it that charges for support... but in those cases they are almost always providing support/accepting bug reports for free as well. And maybe having the customer pay to receive the product itself in the first place, might motivate the developers to help more than if they were just paying for a support plan or something.

              • By sjpb 2026-02-1319:371 reply

                Well, I think this is what SchedMD do with Slurm? GPL code. You can sign up to the bug tracker & open an issue, but if you don't have a support contract they close the issue. And only those customers get advanced notice of CVEs etc. I'd expect nearly everyone who uses it in production has a support contract.

                • By ranger_danger 2026-02-1322:06

                  I think too many people just won't sign up for a support contract, especially if you're charging a lot for it or the product is consumer-oriented.

                  But a reasonable cost for the product itself, that's maybe not as high as a support contract (but comes with some support), might work better.

              • By ragall 2026-02-1323:24

                Some software providers sell software including support, no restriction on number of deployments as well as the possibility for private modifications, then publish under a permissive licence two-three years after a release. That seems to me like a good way of doing things.

          • By rpdillon 2026-02-1316:04

            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.

          • By knowitnone3 2026-02-1315:59

            [dead]

      • By j1elo 2026-02-1312:593 reply

        The only meaningful informed decision, but sadly much less known (and I think we should talk and insist more on it), is to be wary if you see a CLA. Not all do, but most perform Copyright Assignment, and that's detrimental to the long-term robustness of Open Source.

        Having a FOSS license is NOT enough. Idealy the copyright should be distributed across all contributors. That's the only way to make overall consensus a required step before relicensing (except for reimplementation).

        Pick FOSS projects without CLAs that perform Copyright Assignment to an untrusted entity (few exceptions apply, e.g. the FSF in the past)

        • By baq 2026-02-1316:361 reply

          Bad advice.

          You should be wary always. CLA or not, nothing guarantees that the project you depend on will receive updates, not even if you pay for them and the project is 100% closed source.

          What you’re suggesting is perpetuating the myth that open source means updates available forever for free. This is not and never has been the case.

          • By j1elo 2026-02-1318:18

            Was I, really? Maybe, if you feel so... but I'd have to say that I had no idea.

            What I'm suggesting is that a FOSS project without CLAs and a healthy variety of contributors does belong to the broad open source community that forms around it, while a FOSS project with such CLA is just open to a bait-and-switch scheme because the ownership stays in a single hand that can change course at a moments notice.

            Whether the project stops receiving updates or not, is an orthogonal matter.

        • By monkey26 2026-02-142:021 reply

          Do you feel the same way if the CLA is to assign copyright to an non profit foundation that is a steward of that open source project?

          • By j1elo 2026-02-1411:37

            Obviously no, if you trust that foundation; hence my

            > few exceptions apply, e.g. the FSF in the past

        • By everfrustrated 2026-02-1320:41

          You are correct. Signing a CLA is in effect saying you approve this project doing a rug-pull and becoming closed-source in the future.

      • By hiAndrewQuinn 2026-02-139:421 reply

        >Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision.

        "An informed decision" is not a black or white category, and it definitely isn't when we're talking about risk pricing for B2B services and goods, like what MinIO largely was for those who paid.

        Any business with financial modelling worth their salt knows that very few things which are good and free today will stay that way tomorrow. The leadership of a firm you transact with may or may not state this in words, but there are many other ways to infer the likelihood of this covertly by paying close attention.

        And, if you're not paying close attention, it's probably just not that important to your own product. What risks you consider worth tailing are a direct extension of how you view the world. The primary selling point of MinIO for many businesses was, "it's cheaper than AWS for our needs". That's probably still true for many businesses and so there's money to be made at least in the short term.

        • By berkes 2026-02-1310:01

          "Informed decisions" mean you need to have the information.

          Like with software development, we often lack the information on which we have to decide architectural, technical or business decisions.

          The common solution for that is to embrace this. Defer decisions. Make changing easy once you do receive the information. And build "getting information" into the fabric. We call this "Agile", "Lean", "data driven" and so on.

          I think this applies here too.

          Very big chance that MinIO team honestly thought that they'd keep it open source but only now gathered enough "information" to make this "informed decision".

      • By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-139:594 reply

        > 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.

        • By growse 2026-02-1310:184 reply

          It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.

          • By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-1310:202 reply

            Where is this mythical social contract found? I stand by my point: it's a software license, not a marriage.

            Free users certainly would like it to be a social contract like I would like to be gifted a million dollars. Sadly, I still have to work and can't infinitely rely on the generosity of others.

            • By growse 2026-02-1313:302 reply

              The social contract is found (and implicitly negotiated) in the interactions between humans, ie: society.

              • By yunwal 2026-02-1321:18

                Seems like the interaction that happened here was that they stopped supporting it

              • By antonvs 2026-02-1315:50

                Sounds like you've misunderstood this particular social contract. Luckily several people in this thread have corrected you.

            • By account42 2026-02-1311:543 reply

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

              • By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-1312:051 reply

                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 there. You have the code. Open source is not a perpetual service agreement. It is not indentured servitude to the community.

                Stop trying to guilt trip people into giving you free work.

                • By thayne 2026-02-1316:011 reply

                  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.

                  • By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-1316:13

                    The last open source version of MinIO didn't disappear when they stopped maintaining it.

              • By bee_rider 2026-02-1314:44

                I always preferred people who didn’t, when I worked in retail. It generates a nice chill task (wander around the parking lot looking for carts). But if you want to do a favor for the faceless retailer, go for it. Mostly I chuck my cart in the corral to get it out of my way, but this sees more like a morally-neutral action to me.

              • By imtringued 2026-02-1314:01

                In this context the social contract would be an expectation that specifically software developers must return the shopping cart for you, but you would never expect the same from cashiers, construction workers, etc.

                If the software developer doesn't return your cart, he betrayed the social contract.

                This sounds very manipulative and narcissistic.

          • By 627467 2026-02-1311:311 reply

            Show me a FOSS license where a commitment to indefinite maintenance is promised.

            • By account42 2026-02-1311:532 reply

              Social contracts are typically unwritten so the license would be the wrong place to look for it.

              • By PKop 2026-02-1317:09

                > Social contracts are typically unwritten

                Maybe this is the case, but why is your presumption of entitlement to free labor of others the assumed social contract, the assumed "moral" position, rather than the immoral one?

                Why is the assumed social contract that is unwritten not that you can have the free labor we've released to you so far, but we owe you nothing in the future?

                There's too much assumption of the premise that "moral" and "social contract" are terms that make the entitled demands of free-loaders the good guys in this debate. Maybe the better "morality" is the selfless workers giving away the product of their labor for free are the actual good guys.

              • By skeledrew 2026-02-1312:502 reply

                If it's neither written nor explicitly spoken, then it's not a contract of any kind. It's just an - usually naive - expectation.

                • By account42 2026-02-1313:361 reply

                  A social contract isn't a legal contract to begin with, but even for those "written or explicitly spoken" is not a hard requirement.

                  • By skeledrew 2026-02-1315:501 reply

                    A social contract still has to be explicit in some way to be considered such. Otherwise it's just an accepted convention.

                    • By jhbadger 2026-02-142:39

                      That's not what a social contract is you are thinking of a legal contract, something very different. A social contract is by definition, implicit rather than explicit.

                • By dbacar 2026-02-1314:171 reply

                  It was not expectation when they started, did a lot to lure many into the ecosystem. When you release it free, wait for the momentum to build, then you cut off, it is something else. And the worse is they did it in a very short time. Check out elasticsearch, the same route but did not abandon the 7 release like this.

                  • By skeledrew 2026-02-1315:58

                    I know all about ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis, etc. Yes, what they did sucks. No, it doesn't make the maintainers bad or anything. It's still on the user to know that anything can happen to that spiffy project they've been using for a while, and so be prepared to migrate at any time.

          • By PKop 2026-02-1317:041 reply

            Expectations are maybe fine maybe not, but it's funny that people can slap the word moral onto their expectation of others being obligated to do free work for them, and it's supposed to make them be the good guys here.

            Why do you presume to think your definition of morals is shared by everyone? Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?

            • By growse 2026-02-1318:12

              > Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?

              You seem to be mistaking me for someone arguing that anyone is entitled to others' labour?

          • By kube-system 2026-02-1316:14

            No, social contracts require some sort of mutual benefit.

        • By PunchyHamster 2026-02-1310:301 reply

          it's still a bait and switch, considering they started removing features before the abandonment.

          • By Ekaros 2026-02-1310:34

            Users can fork it from point they started removing features. Fully inside social, moral and spiritual contract of open source.

        • By rpdillon 2026-02-1316:11

          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.

        • By dangus 2026-02-1312:222 reply

          This isn’t about people working for free.

          Nobody sensible is upset when a true FOSS “working for free” person hangs up their boots and calls it quits.

          The issue here is that these are commercial products that abuse the FOSS ideals to run a bait and switch.

          They look like they are open source in their growth phase then they rug pull when people start to depend on their underlying technology.

          The company still exists and still makes money, but they stopped supporting their open source variant to try and push more people to pay, or they changed licenses to be more restrictive.

          It has happened over and over, just look at Progress Chef, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, Terraform, etc.

          • By skeledrew 2026-02-1312:563 reply

            In this particular case, it's the fault of the "abused" for even seeing themselves as such in the first place. Many times it's not even a "bait-and-switch", but reality hitting. But even if it was, just deal with it and move on.

            • By imtringued 2026-02-1314:091 reply

              This is definitely the case because the accusations and supposed social contract seem extremely one-sided towards free riding.

              Nobody here is saying they should donate the last version of MinIO to the Apache software foundation under the Apache license. Nobody is arguing for a formalized "end of life" exit strategy for company oriented open source software or implying that such a strategy was promised and then betrayed.

              The demand is always "keep doing work for me for free".

              • By dangus 2026-02-1319:05

                I’m not even claiming that people who feel thar feel that a social contract has been violated are correct.

                I’m saying that the open source rug pull is at this point a known business tactic that is essentially a psychological dark pattern used to exploit.

                These companies know they’ll get more traction and sales if they have “open source” on their marketing material. They don’t/never actually intend to be open source long term. They expect to go closed source/source available business lines as soon as they’ve locked enough people into the ecosystem.

                Open source maintainers/organizations like the GNU project are happy and enthusiastic about delivering their projects to “freeloaders.” They have a sincere belief that having source code freedom is beneficial to all involved. Even corporate project sponsors share this belief: Meta is happy to give away React because they know that ultimately makes their own products better and more competitive.

            • By ghywertelling 2026-02-1314:33

              Make hay while the sun shines. Be glad that the project happened.

            • By dangus 2026-02-1319:131 reply

              I’m not even claiming that the “abused” are correct to be upset.

              The core of my claim is that it’s a shady business tactic because the purpose of it is to gain all the marketing benefits of open source on the front-end (fast user growth, unpaid contributions from users, “street cred” and positive goodwill), then change to source available/business license after the end of the growth phase when users are locked in.

              This is not much different than Southwest Airlines spending decades bragging about “bags fly free” and no fees only to pull the rug and dump their customer goodwill in the toilet.

              Totally legal to do so, but it’s also totally legal for me to think that they’re dishonest scumbags.

              Except in this case, software companies, in my opinion, have this rug pull plan in place from day 1.

              • By skeledrew 2026-02-148:331 reply

                > shady business tactic

                I'd say it's redundant to consider any business tactic as "shady". The purpose of any business is to make a profit, in any way that's legally permissible. Using the "open source" label is just one way to success, if one plays the game well and mitigates any backlash once they "graduate" and change that license. It's up to any given user going in to be aware that a project they depend on may go in any direction, like it or not, and to always be ready to migrate if deemed necessary.

                • By sgarland 2026-02-1414:291 reply

                  That’s the myopic view of a business, yes. It works quite well at scale; reference Wal-Mart, Microsoft, et al. It isn’t the only way, though.

                  H-E-B (or just HEB) is a large, privately-held grocery chain in Texas, and they are beloved by Texans across the societal and political spectrum. They gained and keep this loyalty because they are good neighbors. In the aftermath of hurricanes or floods - of which Texas has many - HEB will be there before FEMA, with water tankers, mobile kitchens and pharmacies, power stations, and so on. They donate 5% of their earnings to local charities, food banks, and education.

                  It’s possible that HEB would make more money if they slashed these programs and raised prices, but I suspect that instead, people would be outraged at the rug pull, publicly shame them, and a competitor would swoop in and build out replacements.

                  • By skeledrew 2026-02-167:53

                    Sounds like they're a good way on the road to being a social enterprise. A very rare thing indeed.

          • By nubinetwork 2026-02-1312:271 reply

            > bait and switch

            Is it really though? They're replacing one product with another, and the replacement comes with a free version.

            • By dangus 2026-02-1319:13

              Free without commercial restrictions? With a real open source license?

      • By vladms 2026-02-139:381 reply

        Isn't this the normal sales anyhow for many products? One attracts a customer with unreasonable promises and features, makes him sign a deal to integrate, then issues appear once in production that make you realize you will need to invest more.

        When you start something (startup, FOSS project, damn even marriage) you might start with the best intentions and then you can learn/change/loose interest. I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing.

        Turning it around, any company that adopts a FOSS project should be honest and pay for something if it does not accept the idea that at some point the project will change course (which obviously, does not guarantee much, because even if you pay for something they can decide to shut it down).

        • By praptak 2026-02-1310:051 reply

          > I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing.

          Obviously you cannot "demand" stuff but you can do your due dilligence as the person who chooses a technical solution. Some projects have more clarity than others, for example the Linux foundation or CNCF are basically companies sharing costs for stuff they all benefit from like Linux or Prometheus monitoring and it is highly unlikely they'd do a rug pull.

          On the other end of the spectrum there are companies with a "free" version of a paid product and the incentive to make the free product crappier so that people pay for the paid version. These should be avoided.

      • By timcobb 2026-02-1313:00

        > Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence.

        How does this look? How does one "just" do this? What if the whole thing was an evolution over time?

      • By kube-system 2026-02-1316:091 reply

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

        • By baq 2026-02-1316:411 reply

          Commercial licenses ditto.

          • By kube-system 2026-02-1317:01

            Gratis commercial licenses, yes. Paid commercial software typically have limited warranties.

      • By qudat 2026-02-1313:49

        At this point I don’t trust any company that offers a core free tool with an upsell. Trials or limited access is one thing, but a free forever product that needs active maintaining, be skeptical.

        It’s been tough for us at https://pico.sh trying to figure out the right balance between free and paid and our north star is: how much does it cost us to maintain and support? If the answer scales with the number of users we have then we charge for it. We also have a litmus test for abuse: can someone abuse the service? We are putting it behind a paywall.

      • By mactavish88 2026-02-1313:20

        I hear this perspective a lot in relation to open source projects.

        What it fails to recognize is the reality that life changes. Shit happens. There's no way to predict the future when you start out building an open source project.

        (Coming from having contributed to and run several open source projects myself)

      • By jillesvangurp 2026-02-1310:401 reply

        It's part of the due diligence process for users to decide if they can trust a project.

        I use a few simple heuristics:

        - Evaluate who contributes regularly to a project. The more diverse this group is, the better. If it's a handful of individuals from 1 company, see other points. This doesn't have to be a show stopper. If it's a bit niche and only a handful of people contribute, you might want to think about what happens when these people stop doing that (like is happening here).

        - Look at required contributor agreements and license. A serious red flag here is if a single company can effectively decide to change the license at any point they want to. Major projects like Terraform, Redis, Elasticsearch (repeatedly), etc. have exercised that option. It can be very disruptive when that happens.

        - Evaluate the license allows you do what you need to do. Licenses like the AGPLv3 (which min.io used here) can be problematic on that front and comes with restrictions that corporate legal departments generally don't like. In the end choosing to use software is a business decision you take. Just make sure you understand what you are getting into and that this is OK with your company and compatible with business goals.

        - Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.) are popular with larger companies and widely used on Github. They facilitate a neutral ground for competitors to collaborate. One aspect you should be aware off is that the very feature that makes them popular also means that contributors can take the software and create modifications under a different license. They generally can't re-license existing software or retroactively. But companies like Elasticsearch have switched from Apache 2.0 to closed source, and recently to AGPLv3. Opensearch remains Apache 2.0 and has a thriving community at this point.

        - Look at the wider community behind a project. Who runs it; how professional are they (e.g. a foundation), etc. How likely would it be to survive something happening to the main company behind a thing? Companies tend to be less resilient than the open source projects they create over time. They fail, are subject to mergers and acquisitions, can end up in the hands of hedge funds, or big consulting companies like IBM. Many decades old OSS projects have survived multiple such events. Which makes them very safe bets.

        None of these points have to be decisive. If you really like a company, you might be willing to overlook their less than ideal licensing or other potential red flags. And some things are not that critical if you have to replace them. This is about assessing risk and balancing the tradeoff of value against that.

        Forks are always an option when bad things happen to projects. But that only works if there's a strong community capable of supporting such a fork and a license that makes that practical. The devil is in the details. When Redis announced their license change, the creation of Valkey was a foregone conclusion. There was just no way that wasn't going to happen. I think it only took a few months for the community to get organized around that. That's a good example of a good community.

        • By 12_throw_away 2026-02-1320:30

          The other heuristic I would add is one that works for commercial/closed source too: evaluate the project exactly as it is now. Do you still want to use it even if 0% of the roadmap ever materializes?

          With open source, the good news is that that the version you currently have will always be available to you in perpetuity - including all the bugs, missing features, and security flaws. If you're ok with that, then the community around the thing doesn't even matter.

      • By yread 2026-02-1312:08

        Easy. If you see open source software maintained by a company, assume they will make it closed source or enshittify the free version. If it's maintained by an individual assume he will get bored with it. Plan accordingly. It may not happen and then you'll be pleasantly surprised

      • By adamcrow64 2026-02-139:52

        exactly

    • By einpoklum 2026-02-139:492 reply

      > Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun.

      I find it the other way around. I feel a bit embarrassed and stressed out working with people who have paid for a copy of software I've made (which admittedly is rather rare). When they haven't paid, every exchange is about what's best for humanity and the public in general, i.e. they're not supposed to get some special treatment at the expense of anyone else, and nobody has a right to lord over the other party.

      • By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-1310:063 reply

        People who paid for your software don't really have a right to lord you around. You can chose to be accommodating because they are your customers but you hold approximately as much if not more weight in the relationship. They need your work. It's not so much special treatment as it is commissioned work.

        People who don't pay are often not really invested. The relationship between more work means more costs doesn't exist for them. That can make them quite a pain in my experience.

        • By einpoklum 2026-02-1317:281 reply

          > People who paid for your software don't really have a right to lord you around.

          Of course I realize that, rationally, but:

          * They might feel highly entitled because they paid.

          * I feel more anxious to satisfy than I should probably be feeling. Perhaps even guilty for having taken money. I realize that is not a rational frame of mind to be in; it would probably change if that happened frequently. I am used to two things: There is my voluntary work, which I share freely and without expecting money; and there is my 'job' where I have to bow my head to management and do not get to pursue the work as I see fit, and I devote most of my time to - but I get paid (which also kind of happens in the background, i.e. I never see the person who actually pays me). Selling a product or a service is a weird third kind of experience which I'm not used to.

          • By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-1323:16

            I think you are making two mistakes here.

            You think you need to bow your head to management in your job which, while you technically are under their authority in some ways, isn't really how I advise you to frame your relationship with your work. You are here to bring value and your manager is there to help you/ensure you do that. Still that's a framework not a rigid guiding stick. You need to learn how to manage/bend your manager if you want to thrive in the corporate world.

            Same with customers. They hire you because they need your expertise. It's a dance not a tether and you need to be two to tango.

            It seems to me you are not putting enough value in what you bring to the table. It's easier to say than it is to feel it and believe it but I guess it's never a bad thing to tell someone.

        • By darkwater 2026-02-1311:441 reply

          I'm probably projecting the idea I have of myself here but if someone says

          > every exchange is about what's best for humanity and the public in general

          it means that they are the kind of individual who deeply care for things to work, relationships to be good and fruitful and thus if they made someone pay for something, they think they must listen to them and comply their requests, because well, they are a paying customer and the customer is always right, they gave me their money etc etc

          • By StopDisinfo910 2026-02-1311:54

            There is no tension there.

            You can care about the work and your customer will still setting healthy boundaries and accepting that wanting to do good work for them doesn't mean you are beside them.

            Business is fundamentally about partnership, transactional and moneyed partnerships, but partnership still. It's best when both suppliers and customers are aware of that and like any partnership, it structured and can be stopped by both partners. You don't technically owe them more than what's in the contract and that puts a hard stop which is easy to identify if needed.

        • By account42 2026-02-1311:57

          Legally speaking, accepting payment makes it very clear that there is a contract under which you have obligations, both explicitly spelled out and implied.

      • By berkes 2026-02-1310:211 reply

        You can achieve something like this with a pricing strategy.

        As DHH and Jason Fried discuss in both the books REWORK, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, and their blog:

        > The worst customer is the one you can’t afford to lose. The big whale that can crush your spirit and fray your nerves with just a hint of their dissatisfaction.

        (It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work)

        > First, since no one customer could pay us an outsized amount, no one customer’s demands for features or fixes or exceptions would automatically rise to the top. This left us free to make software for ourselves and on behalf of a broad base of customers, not at the behest of any single one. It’s a lot easier to do the right thing for the many when you don’t fear displeasing a few super customers could spell trouble.

        (https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/why-we-never-sold-basecamp-by-...)

        But, this mechanism proposed by DHH and Fried only remove differences amongst the paying-customers. I Not between "paying" and "non-paying".

        I'd think, however, there's some good ideas in there to manage that difference as well. For example to let all the customers, paying- or not-paying go through the exact same flow for support, features, bugs, etc. So not making these the distinctive "drivers" why people would pay. E.g. "you must be paying customer to get support". Obviously depends on the service, but maybe if you have other distinctive features that people would pay for (e.g. hosted version) that could work out.

        • By jcgl 2026-02-1313:02

          I think this is a good point and a true point.

          However, I understood GP's mention of "embarrassment" to speak more to their own feelings of responsibility. Which would be more or less decoupled from the pressure that a particular client exerts.

    • By alexpadula 2026-02-1310:19

      I don’t feel that way at all. I’ve been maintaining open source storage systems for few years. I love it. Absolutely love it. I maintain TidesDB it’s a storage engine. I also have back pain but that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you love.

    • By suyash 2026-02-1310:424 reply

      If your main motivation creating/maintaince a popular open source project was to make money then you don't really undersand the open source ethos.

      • By subscribed 2026-02-1316:361 reply

        "eating is for the greedy", noted.

        A little side project might grow and become a chore / untenable, especially with some from the community expecting handouts without respect.

        Case in point, reticulum. Also Nolan Lawson has a very good block post on it.

        I don't think your position is reasonable even if I believe you just want to say that writing open source shouldn't be a main source of the income). I think it's perfectly okay to be rewarded for time, skill, effort, and a software itself.

        • By sgarland 2026-02-1415:15

          Of course it’s OK to be paid for your work; I don’t think anyone reasonable is saying otherwise. RMS even has no problem with it [0] (though he does take issue with the term open source, so there’s that).

          Here’s my take on “the open source philosophy,” having benefited from it since the 90s. Note, I am not nearly as much of a zealot as RMS, and have no strong opinion on GPL vs BSD style licensing; use whichever meets your needs and future plans.

          If I had needed to pay for a Linux distribution as a kid, it’s unlikely I would have been able to explore it.

          If I was unable to figure out software behavior by studying its source code, I would have many unanswered questions today, and Debian’s vixie-cron would likely still have an obscure bug [1].

          I, like practically all people in the tech industry, owe a great deal to people who have given their time to various projects. Some of those people make a living out of it (Daniel Stenberg, for example), but also still offer their software gratis. Therefore, I feel a moral obligation to do so in return.

          0: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

          1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1019716

      • By skeledrew 2026-02-1312:59

        Even if motivation isn't about making money, people still need to eat, and deal with online toxicity.

      • By krystalgamer 2026-02-1310:521 reply

        it's not about the money. for large open source projects you need to allocate time to deal with the community. for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant.

        most projects won't ever reach that level though.

        • By imiric 2026-02-1311:057 reply

          > it's not about the money

          OP sure makes it sound like it's about the money.

          > for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant.

          I never understood this. Then why publish the code in the first place? If the goal is to help others, then the decent thing would be to add documentation and support the people who care enough to use your project. This doesn't mean bending to all their wishes and doing work you don't enjoy, but a certain level of communication and collaboration is core to the idea of open source. Throwing some code over the fence and forgetting about it is only marginally better than releasing proprietary software. I can only interpret this behavior as self-serving for some reason (self-promotion, branding, etc.).

          • By duckmysick 2026-02-1311:331 reply

            Most open source projects start small. The author writes code that solves some issue they have. Likely, someone else has the same problem and they would find the code useful. So it's published. For a while it's quiet, but one day a second user shows up and they like it. Maybe something isn't clear or they have a suggestion. That's reasonable and supporting one person doesn't take much.

            Then the third user shows up. They have an odd edge case and the code isn't working. Fixing it will take some back and forth but it still can be done in a respectable amount of time. All is good. A few more users might show up, but most open source projects will maintain a small audience. Everyone is happy.

            Sometimes, projects keep gaining popularity. Slowly at first, but the growth in interest is there. More bug reports, more discussions, more pull requests. The author didn't expect it. What was doable before takes more effort now. Even if the author adds contributors, they are now a project and a community manager. It requires different skills and a certain mindset. Not everyone is cut out for this. They might even handle a small community pretty well, but at a certain size it gets difficult.

            The level of communication and collaboration required can only grow. Not everyone can deal with this and that's ok.

            • By imiric 2026-02-1313:491 reply

              All of that sounds reasonable. But it also doesn't need to be a reason to find maintaining OSS very draining or unpleasant, as GP put it.

              First of all, when a project grows, its core team of maintainers can also grow, so that the maintenance burden can be shared. This is up to the original author(s) to address if they think their workload is a problem.

              Secondly, and coming back to the post that started this thread, the comment was "working for free is not fun", implying that if people paid for their work, then it would be "fun". They didn't complain about the amount of work, but about the fact that they weren't financially compensated for it. These are just skewed incentives to have when working on an open source project. It means that they would prioritize support of paying customers over non-paying users, which indirectly also guides the direction of the project, and eventually leads to enshittification and rugpulls, as in MinIO's case.

              The approach that actually makes open source projects thrive is to see it as an opportunity to build a community of people who are passionate about a common topic, and deal with the good and the bad aspects as they come. This does mean that you will have annoying and entitled users, which is the case for any project regardless of its license, but it also means that your project will be improved by the community itself, and that the maintenance burden doesn't have to be entirely on your shoulders. Any successful OSS project in history has been managed this way, while those that aren't remain a footnote in some person's GitHub profile, or are forked by people who actually understand open source.

              • By imtringued 2026-02-1315:00

                Honestly, I don't see how you're adding anything here other than inflated expectations and a strange anti-individual pro-mega-corporation ideology.

                Fundamentally your post boils down to this: All contributions should be self funded by the person making them.

                This might seem acceptable at first glance, but it has some really perverse implications that are far worse than making a product customers are willing to pay for.

                To be granted the right to work on an open source project, you must have a day job that isn't affiliated with the project. You must first work eight hours a day to ensure your existence, only after those eight hours are up, are you allowed to work on the open source project.

                Every other form of labor is allowed to charge for money, even the street cleaner or the elderly janitor stocking up on his pension, everyone except the open source developer and that everyone includes people who work on behalf of a company that directly earns money off the open source project, including software developers hired by said company even if those software developers work full time on the open source project. This means that you can run into absurd scenarios like SF salaries being paid for contributors, while the maintainer, who might be happy with an average polish developer salary doesn't even get the little amount they would need to live a hermit life doing nothing but working on the project. No, that maintainer is expected, I mean obligated, to keep working his day job to then be granted the privilege of working for free.

                Somehow the maintainer is the selfish one for wanting his desire to exist be equally as important as other people's desire for the project to exist. The idea that people value the project but not the process that brings about the project sounds deeply suspect.

                Your complaint that prioritizing paid feature is bad is disturbing, because of the above paragraph. The maintainer is expected to donate his resources for the greater good, but in instances where the maintainer could acquire resources to donate to the public at large through the project itself, he must not do so, because he must acquire the donation resources through his day job. To be allowed to prioritize the project, he must deprioritize the project.

                The strangest part by far though is that if you are a company that produces and sells proprietary software, you're the good guy. As I said in the beginning. This feels like a very anti OSS stance since open source software is only allowed to exist in the shadow of proprietary software that makes money. The argument is always that certain types of software should not exist and that the things that are supposedly being withheld are more important than the things being created.

                I personally think this type of subtractive thinking is very insidious. You can have the best intentions in the world and still be branded the devil. Meanwhile the devil can do whatever he wants. There is always this implicit demand that you ought to be an actual devil for the good of everyone.

          • By orphea 2026-02-1312:03

              > but a certain level of communication and collaboration is core to the idea of open source.
            Ugh, no. Open source is "I made something cool, here, you can have it too", anything beyond that is your own expectations.

          • By account42 2026-02-1312:04

            > I never understood this. Then why publish the code in the first place? If the goal is to help others, then the decent thing would be to add documentation and support the people who care enough to use your project.

            Because these things take entirely different skill sets and the latter might be a huge burden for someone who is good at the former.

          • By skeledrew 2026-02-1313:08

            The person "throwing" the software has 0 obligation to any potential or actual users of said software. Just the act of making it available, even without any kind of license, is already benevolent. Anything further just continues to add to that benevolence, and nothing can take away from it, not even if they decide to push a malware-ridden update.

            There is obligation to a given user only if it's explicitly specified in a license or some other communication to which the user is privy.

          • By abenga 2026-02-1315:03

            > support the people who care enough to use your project.

            You make that sound like they are helping the developer. The help is going the other way, it seems to me.

          • By bdauvergne 2026-02-1312:41

            Who gave you the right to "decent" things anyway ? Yeah it would be cool, but do you have any lega/social/moral right to it ? Absolutely not.

          • By jamespo 2026-02-1311:29

            That collaboration goes both ways, or not as is often the case.

      • By pqtyw 2026-02-1321:09

        Isn't most (presumably the overwhelming majority) of opensource development is funded by for profit companies? That has been the case for quite a while too...

    • By ForHackernews 2026-02-1310:451 reply

      Maybe open source developers should stop imagining the things they choose to give away for free as "products". I maintain a small open source library. It doesn't make any money, it will never make any money, people are free to use or not as they choose. If someone doesn't like the way I maintain the repository they are free to fork it.

      • By palata 2026-02-1311:402 reply

        Agreed, but that's only half of it. The second half is that open source users should stop imagining the things they choose to use for free as "products".

        Users of open source often feel entitled, open issues like they would open a support ticket for product they actually paid for, and don't hesitate to show their frustration.

        Of course that's not all the users, but the maintainers only see those (the happy users are usually quiet).

        I have open sourced a few libraries under a weak copyleft licence, and every single time, some "people from the community" have been putting a lot of pressure on me, e.g. claiming everywhere that the project was unmaintained/dead (it wasn't, I just was working on it in my free time on a best-effort basis) or that anything not permissive had "strings attached" and was therefore "not viable", etc.

        The only times I'm not getting those is when nobody uses my project or when I don't open source it. I have been open sourcing less of my stuff, and it's a net positive: I get less stress, and anyway I wasn't getting anything from the happy, quiet users.

        • By EdiX 2026-02-1312:52

          It used to be that annoying noobs were aggressively told to RTFM, their feelings got hurt and they would go away. That probably was too harsh. But then came corporate OSS and with it corporate HR in OSS. Being the BOFH was now bad, gatekeeping was bad. Now everyone feels entitled to the maintainer time and maintainers burn out.

          It's a trade off, we made it collectively.

        • By account42 2026-02-1312:011 reply

          I think this gets complicated when you have larger open source projects where contributors change over time. By taking over stewardship of something that people depend on you should have some obligation to not intentionally fuck those people over even if you are not paid for it.

          This is also true to some extend when it's a project you started. I don't think you should e.g. be able to point to the typical liability disclaimer in free software licenses when you add features that intentionally harm your users.

          • By palata 2026-02-1314:411 reply

            > By taking over stewardship of something that people depend on you should have some obligation

            No. If it's free and open source, all it says is what you can do with the code. There is no obligation towards the users whatsoever.

            If you choose to depend on something, it's your problem. The professional way to do it is either to contractually make sure that the project doesn't "fuck you over" (using your words), or to make sure that you are able to fork the project if necessary.

            If you base your business on the fact that someone will be working for you, for free, forever, then it's your problem.

            • By account42 2026-02-168:511 reply

              The problem is that open source projects are not just code but also communities and some authority over what ends up getting packaged in distros. The obligation is not to make people's experiences worse than what they would be had you not contributed and doing it for free doesn't absolve you of that.

              • By palata 2026-02-178:46

                > open source projects are not just code but also communities

                No. Open source projects are open source projects. Open sourcing my code does not mean at all that I have to build a community.

                > The obligation is

                There is no obligation. Again I don't say that authors should be jerks (obviously they shouldn't), but what seems very unclear to too many people is that users are not entitled to anything at all.

                Because you choose to depend on something that someone provided for free does not mean they now owe you anything. Just like if I donate 20 dollars to a charity, it doesn't mean that I must now volunteer for that charity.

    • By eikenberry 2026-02-1318:31

      I've been involved with free software for coming on 30 years, have maintained several reasonably popular free software projects and have 100% enjoyed it every time. Developing relationships with the community members and working with them toward a common goal is very rewarding. Not much more to say about this as these are subjective interpretations of our experiences and the experiences could be very different. But it definitely can be fun.

    • By silverwind 2026-02-1315:51

      > Working for free is not fun

      Open source can be very fun if you genuinely enjoy it.

      The problem is dealing with people that have wrong expectations, those need to be ignored.

    • By XCSme 2026-02-1314:07

      Thanks, you finally settled my dilemma of whether I should have a free version of UXWizz...

    • By bityard 2026-02-1316:27

      > Working for free is not fun.

      Why were you doing it then?

    • By imiric 2026-02-1310:56

      It's remarkable how many people wrongly assume that open source projects can't be monetized. Business models and open source are orthogonal but compatible concepts. However, if your primary goal while maintaining an open source project is profiting financially from it, your incentives are skewed. If you feel this way, you should also stop using any open source projects, unless you financially support them as well.

      Good luck with the back pain.

    • By apeters 2026-02-1315:13

      Ex mailcow owner here. Can confirm. Hard times.

      I loved everyone in the community though. By heart. You were the best.

    • By samrith 2026-02-1310:53

      [dead]

  • By chrislusf 2026-02-143:02

    I work on SeaweedFS since 2011, and full time since 2025.

    SeaweedFS was started as a learning project and evolves along the way, getting ideas from papers for Facebook Haystack, Google Colossus, Facebook Tectonics. With its distributed append-only storage, it naturally fits object store. Sorry to see MinIO went away. SeaweedFS learned a lot from it. Some S3 interface code was copied from MinIO when it was still Apache 2.0 License. AWS S3 APIs are fairly complicated. I am trying to replicate as much as possible.

    Some recent developments:

    * Run "weed mini -dir=xxx", it will just work. Nothing else to setup.

    * Added Table Bucket and Iceberg Catalog.

    * Added admin UI

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