MinIO Removes Web UI Features from Community Version, Pushes Users to Paid Plans

https://biggo.com/news/202505261334_MinIO_Removes_Web_UI_Features

by jordigh • 1 year ago

176 98 1 year ago

biggo.com

anotherhue• 1 year ago

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?

phoronixrly• 1 year ago

Good call. Meanwhile anyone is entitled to fork while minio are completely entitled to enshittify as much as they like.

nine_k• 1 year ago

This actually sounds fair. Either you pay for their efforts towards development and maintenance, or make your own efforts.

The saddest thing here is that MinIO is apparently not important enough for the big names that use it to receive donations / sponsorship funds sufficient to continue as is :-/

j1elo• 1 year ago

That's perfectly fine but the investor exists in this scenario because of the user base that the product has; and the user base itself exists in part because of the features that were given for free and later are removed. Would they have been able to even have investment if the parts they want to charge for, had been charged for from the start, to avoid the bait and switch?

mikepurvis2• 1 year ago

As a thought experiment, what if instead of the company removing the web UI, the company had folded and left 1.x as the last version of MinIO, while some new company was formed which forked MinIO 1.x to a different name and removed those things, offering them under a freemium model?

I think in that scenario, it would be much more clear-cut that the responses would be:

1. Well that's a bummer that MinIO wasn't sustainable as it was; I'll just stick with 1.x forever, or

2. Well thank goodness this new company stepped up and is taking over maintenance and development; I'm willing to pay them to get ongoing support and having continued access to the web console feature in new versions seems like a fair price to pay.

linsomniac• 1 year ago

thanks.dev seems to me like it's making SOME headway into paying open source developers. At least, I've fallen into a couple hundred bucks of unexpected payments there for open source contributions.

Also, github sponsors seems to work some as well. I enabled it last year and I've had a few gracious souls throw up to $50 at a time into my tip jar, though I've sent out way more than has come in (but that's ok).

I sure wish I could get my company to start contributing some significant funds though. We get a huge benefit from open source, but never seem to have the money to spend towards it.

lenerdenator5• 1 year ago

I sure wish I could get my company to start contributing some significant funds though. We get a huge benefit from open source, but never seem to have the money to spend towards it.

What, and pay the people actually creating the value?!

lenerdenator5• 1 year ago

If they want or need a payday, they probably shouldn't be expecting it from code, that serves a purpose for technically-inclined people, that they released for free in a non-reversible manner.

We need more people looking to Jimmy Wales as an example of how FLOSS can work instead of Silicon Valley.

ujkhsjkdhf2344• 1 year ago

What did Jimmy Wales do they should be emulated?

jsiepkes• 1 year ago

I highly doubt they are running at a loss now. They want a bigger piece of the pie. A bunch of donations or paying OSS devs isn't going to bring in the money a successful for-profit operation with licenses per user, per CPU, per month, per.... is going to bring in.

mystified5016• 1 year ago

The problem is not developers accepting investing, but that investors are predatory and malicious. The company and product doesn't matter and they'll happily burn it to the ground if that makes more money.

As a society we should probably consider such behavior unacceptable and deserving of strong governmental protection. But alas, this behavior makes line go up.

riku_iki• 1 year ago

The company and product doesn't matter and they'll happily burn it to the ground if that makes more money.

they do not burn it to the ground, community has open source high quality product for absolutely free developed on investors money. Anyone can fork it, and do whatever he wants. I imagine if product is very good, and parent corp will decide to close sources, there could be some smaller business/consultancy supporting OSS version of this, or even MS/Google take over it as it happened many times e.g. ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch.

pjmlp3• 1 year ago

The problem is feeling entitled to be paid for a job, even getting something like a Mac, without ever contributing a penny to upstream, across all tools that make that nice paying job possible in first place.

weinzierl2• 1 year ago

True, but there is something else we all can do to prevent cases like MinIO and all the others that cause outrage on HN every couple of weeks:

Only contribute to projects that:

1. Have a Copyleft license

2. Have no CLA and do not require copyright assignment

3. Have enough independent contributors to make relicensing practically impossible

Bonus points if the project is governed by a 501(3) (not a 501(6)).

MinIO fails point 2. Redis failed point 1. Happy to hear a good example for failing point 3. Basically a (A)GPL product that was only developed by employees.

pas2• 1 year ago

Redis became OSI approved again. Also if MinIO and this UI is that amazing, then people would fork it.

(Unfortunately I never had good experiences with MinIO, because it was just a bit less complicated than Ceph and the docs and admin tools much less mature and stable, and due to this I simply never got to performance evaluation.)

pjmlp3• 1 year ago

Indeed, paying for expensive toys like Apple hardware is a given, but paying for the tools that make one's job possible in first place is asking too much.

No wonder that we are slowly coming back to the shareware, public domain and trial demos, used to distribute software on 8 and 16 bit home computing.

JimBlackwood• 1 year ago

The gap in pricing between enterprise and open source makes it impossible.

If MinIO were to require a license to run, I’m sure I could convince a boss at work to pay several thousands a month for it.

Currently, we are paying about 5000€/month for the hardware to run our MinIO cluster and 0€/month for the MinIO devs. If we now want to keep using their UI, the license costs would be €20.000,-/month. That is an insane gap

victorbjorklund• 1 year ago

Sad to see they going down this road. Any alternatives?

jgys• 1 year ago

I’d start with reading the article; it lists several.

remram3• 1 year ago

The article lists other S3-compatible servers that also don't have UIs. That doesn't fix the problem.

bitfilped• 1 year ago

Ceph, Garage, JuiceFS, SeaweedFS

dardeaup2• 1 year ago

Also OpenStack Swift

xnyan2• 1 year ago

The most established option is Ceph, which has a (optional) web ui too. It's what I use and I'm happy with it.

Before investigating it for eventual production use, I heard quite a bit about how complicated it was to use, but for my use case (storage for enterprise and academic k8s clusters) it's actually been quite simple to deploy and use. cephadm (one of many ceph management tools) can handle nearly all our bootstrapping and management needs. Little to no tweaking or configuration needed. Fairly low overhead. Very reliable and resilient to adverse conditions. Easy to handle different storage types and data retention needs.

One thing I will warn you, if you go the ceph docs site right now and just start browsing, it is in fact quite overwhelming because ceph has the capacity to handle a ton of edge cases and unusual environments. I'd recommend taking 15 minutes and build this [1], which gives you a fully functional toy-sized ceph cluster on a single node. Then, hit the docs to fill in the gaps of what you need to know for your deployment.

1: https://hackmd.io/@yujungcheng/B1lCV3UH9

remram3• 1 year ago

4 days ago, 13 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093987

itherseed• 1 year ago

Yeah, but the article from biggo is a much better summary that I could do at that moment

bitbasher2• 1 year ago

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.

piker• 1 year ago

Feels like the last sentence would have been the sentiment to lead off with. "Strangest" carries a negative connotation that doesn't feel fair here especially when coupled with an apparently negative headline about a money grab.

bitbasher2• 1 year ago

^ I tweaked the first sentence a bit, hope that's a little more clear!

NewJazz2• 1 year ago

Sounds like they gave up on technical interviews and hoped their reputation was enough to get people to submit work for free in the hopes of a paid position.

Fly does something similar, except they pay you for the evaluation work.

fuddy• 1 year ago

As long as they don't keep the work both sides are really throwing effort away as it should be.. One might be going into technical interviews with no prep but one threw a lot away to get to that point and potentially loses a lot in negotiation potential from doing no prep.

msarrel• 1 year ago

Having worked there for 3 years, I completely agree. There are no processes for anything. I believe this is because they expect the entire company to work hard to please the CEO and his wife, who is not qualified but has a lot of power.

It's sad because this was a great product that grew to be what it was as a result of community interest, and now they're destroying the community version to try to force revenue. Maybe they'll even triple the price again for no reason other than that they can.

rowanseymour• 1 year ago

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.

swyx• 1 year ago

please figure that out at the start so everyone knows what they're working with.

goals change man. who of us knew what we'd be doing today 9 years ago when minio was founded

NewJazz2• 1 year ago

Goals change but maybe maintainers should fork and start new things. See e.g. node then deno.

_cenw• 1 year ago

The diff contains this addition:

    fetch("https://dl.min.io/server/minio/agplv3-ack", {
      mode: "no-cors",
    })

This looks like it could be the "you downloaded the Virtual Box Expansion Pack from a corporate IP" Oracle playbook to me. Certainly falls under "mistreating the user".

lyu072822• 1 year ago

Obviously to extort some licensing from companies. Perhaps that could finally lead to some welcome clarification of the AGPL in the courts. Never been tested before afaik

aspenmayer4• 1 year ago

Isn't the Neo4j case a case of AGPL being undermined as a EULA in court? I'm having trouble interpreting whether the AGPL licence was affirmed or not in this ruling. Never thought I'd see the DMCA used for good and not evil, to be honest, so this ruling is likely running up against some cognitive dissonance in my logic circuits, but pretty sure this is another bad DMCA case from my amateur legal perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo4j#Criticisms

Neo4j sued PureThink, a small business that had used a power created under the terms of the GNU AGPL, to remove a restrictive Commons clause that Neo4j had added to the AGPL license. The United States District Court for the Northern District of California made a decision on 2024-07-22 to impose $597,000 in actual damages on PureThink, having previously decided that PureThink had violated the DMCA by removing the Commons Clause from Neo4j's AGPL license, and that it had violated trademark law by continuing to use the name Neo4j in selling to government agencies.

JadeNB2• 1 year ago

Could you explain what's going on here, and why it's mistreating the user? I don't doubt it, but don't understand.

hu3• 1 year ago

This code executes a request to MinIO servers which allows them to log your IP.

furkansahin2• 1 year ago

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.

jordigh• 1 year ago

Well, the real issues won't be on the open source version. They've more or less confirmed on their slack that the open source version is in maintenance-only mode:

https://jamesoclaire.com/2025/05/27/how-to-self-host-your-ow...

furkansahin2• 1 year ago

Alright, that's a s**show. I have already been looking for alternatives. Time to move.

igtztorrero• 1 year ago

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.

aidenn0• 1 year ago

Is that second number just the software license price? That's orders of magnitude more than paying a cloud provider to store 5TB for a year on their hardware (and even more expensive than storing on s3 with 5PB of egress.

jorams• 1 year ago

The price you quote seems to be for 5 PiB of storage, not 5 TB. The $96,000 covers the first 400 TiB, and after that it seems to be, or at least start at, $20 / TiB per month. If I understand it correctly that means it costs roughly the same as the major cloud providers, except you also have to supply your own hardware. Very much not aimed at small business.

mattbee2• 1 year ago

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.

VoidWhisperer• 1 year ago

My question is that given this, do you plan to still stick with MinIO (I'm assuming that whatever they charge in licensing is probably trivial cost-wise when you are at a company setting up 10s of PiB of object storage), switch to the forked one that still has the features, or switch to another solution entirely?

mattbee2• 1 year ago

My client pays every other equipment vendor for annual support but minio quoted millions of dollars per year, which was too much.

Ceph seems like the only battle-tested alternative. It has a community around it, but the setup is more demanding than minio.

latchkey• 1 year ago

I haven't tried it myself yet, but Seaweedfs seems like a good alternative to consider comparing against...

https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs#compared-to-minio

lioeters2• 1 year ago

Thanks, I love it when I learn about an apparently hugely popular tool I'd never heard of.

unsnap_biceps2• 1 year ago

I ran seaweedfs for a few years and kept losing data due to bugs. I just switched to minio a few months ago and have been loving it.

lyu072822• 1 year ago

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.

Havoc2• 1 year ago

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.

lars_francke2• 1 year ago

Which alternatives are there though? Honest question.

- Ceph

- SeaweedFS

- Garage

- CubeFS

- Apache Ozone

Do any of them fill the niche that MinIO sits in? (Relatively easy to set up and operate and with all the typical enterprise bells & whistles)

Ozone/Ceph -> Way more complicated

danudey• 1 year ago

Which alternatives are there though

Among others, an inevitable torrent of forks of MinIO by people who want to keep the UI but backport any other security or architectural fixes.

Or, as the author points out and if it works for you, a 33% price increase to go to B2 from Backblaze and not have to manage your own hardware, network, infrastructure, etc.

Or, for enterprise shops, another storage appliance with an S3-compatible interface (e.g. Dell has some options)

Havoc2• 1 year ago

Most of the selfhosting gang seems to be going for garage out of those

chatmasta• 1 year ago

Is this article LLM-generated? My spidey sense is tingling.

There’s probably a better more original source…

samgranieri• 1 year ago

Time for this to be forked or just use the version previous to these changes

Henkey• 1 year ago

use this image tag RELEASE.2025-04-08T15-41-24Z

weinzierl2• 1 year ago

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.

miss_chiefff• 1 year ago

have you checked out Tigris Data? S3 compatible drop in replacement for S3, free tier to check it out. no vendor lock-in, no egress fees.

https://www.tigrisdata.com/docs/

MinIO Removes Web UI Features from Community Version, Pushes Users to Paid Plans

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