I went to an interview at minio's office back in early 2017 and had the most bizarre interview I have ever had as a software engineer.
I went into the office and met the two founders. Both were nice and welcoming, but it felt like there was absolutely zero process or structure in the company at all. They didn't have a product or vision. It was more or less "we're building cool stuff".
I wasn't asked a single technical or business question. I was asked what I would like to work on and they suggested I come into the office and do some open source work on whatever I want and if I enjoyed it they would hire me.
Not a bad experience, but very bizarre and out of the norm.
If we were serious about funding open source, I don't think this would be as common.
If a developer needs a pay day, are we surprised if they take it from an investor who wants returns?
It's odd that it's the UI they removed (which was always lacking features anyway, like lifecycle configuration) instead of replication support which feels more enterprisesque.
It's also perhaps worth pointing out that they once had a very strange interpretation of AGPL that caused quite the drama some years ago: https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13308#issuecomment-929...
> Also, just want to mention that the AGPL license requires that all software connecting with MinIO be 100% open source for you/your users not to be in violation of the license.
That's the type of people we are dealing with here, probably best to stay away from it. If AGPL itself didn't already deter you.
Every time something like this happens it seems clear the problem is changing the vision for a project - once you've gotten a community invested in a different vision. There are lots of great projects doing something in between fully community driven Open Source and closed source. Nobody is obliged to license their work in any particular way... but please figure that out at the start so everyone knows what they're working with.
4 days ago, 13 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093987
I really like Minio, but it's very expensive. The cheapest license costs $96,000 annually. For a small business that needs 5 TB of storage, the cost is $851,520 annually, which is out of budget. I think they should consider scaling their prices more affordably, and that way they'll reach a broader customer base.
Sad to see they going down this road. Any alternatives?
Look, this is basically a UI change. None of those features are removed from backend and I hope they don't, ever. As an engineer who maintains a kind of a beefy MinIO cluster myself, I already have a bunch of complaints about the product. UI is not one of them. I really hope that this move is simply the result of a re-org that moves more people to work on real issues.
The diff contains this addition:
fetch("https://dl.min.io/server/minio/agplv3-ack", {
mode: "no-cors",
})
They're ofc free to do whatever they want but I don't see how this won't go horribly wrong.
S3 is pretty well established and commoditized and there are alternatives.
There is literally no moat here, let alone one that would hold up for charging nearly 100 grand. Seems like a pretty bizarre play.
What is a good alternative? What I am looking for is a drop-in replacement for real AWS S3 for customers that can't or don't want to use it. Should have all the major features of AWS S3 (similar to MinIO) but nothing else. I am not interested in a huge storage solution that is hard to set up and maintain and also does S3 somehow, partially.
Is this article LLM-generated? My spidey sense is tingling.
There’s probably a better more original source…
Time for this to be forked or just use the version previous to these changes
I'm in the middle of setting up a few 10s of PiBs with minio, and this does seem like a weird decision.
The deleted console UI helped you understand the data in the system, get started with it and do some basic admin. But for any real application built on it, you'd need to build some of your own tooling and get acquainted with the mc command line tool. It was a very shallow UI - it didn't help with ACLs where you just had a big box to paste your JSON into.
It also had a lot of asterisks to show you which tabs were premium - at least they were visible.
Now it lets you browse buckets, but not create users? All the premium tabs are gone. If I hadn't used it before this I'd have assumed it was just raw and unfinished.
It's solid software, but the documentation really only covers the happy paths, and there's no community around it.
Annual pricing for the complete package & support is about 75% of Backblaze's, but you have to bring your own hardware and network. I guess it compares much more favorably against S3, or maybe better still if you're going to exabytes.
But yeah this just seems like damage to the on-ramp for people who want to grow into it.