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

176 points by jordigh 1 month ago | 103 comments
  • mattbee 1 month 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.

    • latchkey 1 month 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

      • unsnap_biceps 1 month 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.
        • cchance 1 month ago
          I'm thinking of going with garage i heard its really solid and they arent doing shady shit like this removal from minio
        • lioeters 1 month ago
          Thanks, I love it when I learn about an apparently hugely popular tool I'd never heard of.
      • VoidWhisperer 1 month 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?
        • mattbee 1 month 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.

          • pas 1 month ago
            Ceph setup has a few magic moments, but after you accept and learn those incantation, it just works! Highly recommend. Used to be easy to get started with their all-in-one container image.
            • xnyan 1 month ago
              Ceph is demanding to learn, but once you do It Just Works very reliably. The cephadm tool makes it quite easy to bootstrap and manage a vanilla cluster, I'd highly recommend bootstrapping a toy cluster with it if you're interested in learning. Everything can run in a container, and there's a decent webui that's useful for learning and visualization.
        • bitbasher 1 month 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.

          • msarrel 1 month 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.

            • piker 1 month 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.
              • bitbasher 1 month ago
                ^ I tweaked the first sentence a bit, hope that's a little more clear!
              • NewJazz 1 month 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 month 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.
              • anotherhue 1 month 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?

                • j1elo 1 month 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?
                  • mikepurvis 1 month 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.

                    • jchw 1 month ago
                      I don't actually think it would go down like that so I think the point is moot, but are we really going to go through this again? Developers should (and often do) know better than to get into these unsustainable situations, but they still do it.

                      I have some unsolicited advice: please don't open source something that you are actively planning to sell. Nobody will take this advice of course, because delivering your product as an open source project is an easy way to generate some leads and even get some free labor here and there. But if you don't want people to feel deceived, start with your expectations out front and magically people won't be angry at you.

                      On the other hand, I agree people wouldn't be angry at company B in this scenario, because they're not the ones who set the incorrect expectations to begin with. OTOH though I really do doubt "we just removed some features so we could charge you for them" would be a successful pitch as a brand new vendor for something.

                      I'm struggling to understand how there's even still a lot of debate on this subject because it's very simple, if you can pull off a sustainable FOSS project then the world will be grateful but in many cases it becomes very clear over time that there was effectively no plan, just a lot of hope that maybe things would work out somehow. Whatever good that is.

                  • weinzierl 1 month 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.

                    • pas 1 month 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.)

                    • linsomniac 1 month 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.

                      • lenerdenator 1 month 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?!

                        • robertlagrant 1 month ago
                          There's no point doing this. If something is being given away with no strings attached, don't be surprised when it's used.
                      • jsiepkes 1 month 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.
                        • JimBlackwood 1 month 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

                          • pjmlp 1 month 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.

                            • mystified5016 1 month 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 month 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.

                                • pjmlp 1 month 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.
                                • phoronixrly 1 month ago
                                  Good call. Meanwhile anyone is entitled to fork while minio are completely entitled to enshittify as much as they like.
                                  • nine_k 1 month 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 :-/

                                    • overfeed 1 month ago
                                      The big names have their own storage solutions they are trying to sell (or quietly using internally). MinIO is at best, something they can't make use of, or at worst, competition.
                                      • pjmlp 1 month ago
                                        Dual license is the way, GPL + commercial.

                                        Downstream only gets to do whatever they are willing to contribute upstream.

                                    • lenerdenator 1 month 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.

                                      • ujkhsjkdhf234 1 month ago
                                        What did Jimmy Wales do they should be emulated?
                                        • lenerdenator 1 month ago
                                          Built a massive software effort (Wikimedia) based on volunteers that is open and keeps him decently comfortable in a nice city (London), but little more.

                                          He's led the effort in a way that has enabled to project to stick to the core values.

                                    • lyu07282 1 month 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.

                                      • rowanseymour 1 month 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 month 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

                                          • NewJazz 1 month ago
                                            Goals change but maybe maintainers should fork and start new things. See e.g. node then deno.
                                        • remram 1 month ago
                                          4 days ago, 13 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093987
                                          • itherseed 1 month ago
                                            Yeah, but the article from biggo is a much better summary that I could do at that moment
                                          • igtztorrero 1 month 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.
                                            • jorams 1 month 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.
                                              • aidenn0 1 month 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.
                                              • victorbjorklund 1 month ago
                                                Sad to see they going down this road. Any alternatives?
                                                • jgys 1 month ago
                                                  I’d start with reading the article; it lists several.
                                                  • remram 1 month ago
                                                    The article lists other S3-compatible servers that also don't have UIs. That doesn't fix the problem.
                                                    • amluto 1 month ago
                                                      None of those support the use case I actually want: an S3-compatible server that stores data locally and replicates to a cloud provider. Ideally it should also store enough integrity-checking metadata what one can verify that everything is replicated correctly to the cloud after the fact.
                                                  • xnyan 1 month 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

                                                    • bitfilped 1 month ago
                                                      Ceph, Garage, JuiceFS, SeaweedFS
                                                      • dardeaup 1 month ago
                                                        Also OpenStack Swift
                                                    • furkansahin 1 month 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.
                                                    • asmor 1 month 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".
                                                      • lyu07282 1 month 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
                                                        • aspenmayer 1 month 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.

                                                        • JadeNB 1 month 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 month ago
                                                            This code executes a request to MinIO servers which allows them to log your IP.
                                                      • Havoc 1 month 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_francke 1 month 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 month 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)

                                                            • lars_francke 1 month ago
                                                              Our customers are mostly on-prem and we usually hope they have a storage appliance (Netapp, Dell, VAST, ...).

                                                              But for those wanting other options and self-host something it's not clear cut.

                                                            • Havoc 1 month ago
                                                              Most of the selfhosting gang seems to be going for garage out of those
                                                              • cschmittiey 1 month ago
                                                                yeah i’ve recently switched to garage. has been rock solid and there’s UIs out there for the simple self hosted cases that are easy to setup and use (and manage acls!)
                                                          • weinzierl 1 month 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.
                                                          • chatmasta 1 month ago
                                                            Is this article LLM-generated? My spidey sense is tingling.

                                                            There’s probably a better more original source…

                                                            • samgranieri 1 month ago
                                                              Time for this to be forked or just use the version previous to these changes
                                                              • Henkey 3 weeks ago
                                                                use this image tag RELEASE.2025-04-08T15-41-24Z
                                                              • 1 month ago
                                                                • CelinaMarquez 1 month ago
                                                                  [dead]
                                                                  • therealpygon 1 month ago
                                                                    [flagged]
                                                                    • 65 1 month ago
                                                                      I think you might be drinking too much of the Silicon Valley Kool Aid right now.
                                                                      • therealpygon 1 month ago
                                                                        [flagged]
                                                                        • asmor 1 month ago
                                                                          The only thing that'll be exponential about the future of AI is how fast their models collapse as all possible training data becomes at least partially synthetic and untainted words and code become the next low background steel.
                                                                          • breuleux 1 month ago
                                                                            Sustained exponential growth doesn't really exist in reality. It's usually sigmoidal: rapid, explosive growth until it tapers off and ends in an S shape. There are good physical reasons for this.
                                                                            • ceejayoz 1 month ago
                                                                              Right now, positing that AI will see continued exponential growth is basically doing the XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/605/

                                                                              We've already seen diminishing returns hinting at a non-exponential trajectory.