Minio Stops Distributing Free Docker Images

Garage should support partial content seeking via its HTTP interface, if it is S3 API compatible which includes support for range requests/206 Partial Content response.

It does matter, since the current AGPL license status is questionable at best, they did not have permission to relicense code added by contributors. This is why CLAs exist.

We also find the Wiktionary definition [1]:

> One who does not contribute or pay appropriately; one who gets a free ride, etc. without paying a fair share.

Which I believe is a bit more generic (giving back might not be the only way of being fair).

> You may think of that term negatively

But the term carries a negative judgement, what's the point of this term otherwise? Without the judgemental part, you'd just say "using for free" or something.

The whole question is: is it fair to use open source software for free?

And I believe it is. Actually, this is stronger than this: I believe people should feel free to use free software for free, and should not be looked down for doing so. This is key for freedom 0 to be an actual thing. (I'm not set in stone in this position and would be happy change my mind on this though).

The notion of "giving back" can be discussed. I believe it is fair to get stuff from Person A for free and then helping B for free (later or earlier), in the hope that some person P will eventually help / have helped Person A for free for instance - this has the potential to provide everyone with a strong, helpful society and it would be even more enjoyable and reliable than a society that enforces pair to pair transactions.

Indeed, if someone always takes stuff for free and never contributes to anything, I would find this unfair (unless for some reason they can't contribute back, because of a disability or something). I would call this freeloading. Society cannot work like this. But you need the bigger picture to assess this.

When you start to try thinking about all this, the concepts of giving back, fairness, etc, it gets quite complicated. You also need to take in account the way society and the economical system works as a whole. What are the incentives, the motives, etc?

Basically, qualifying someone as a "open source freeloader" without context just because they use freedom 0 without paying is quite bold and might not be fair.

What if a company uses MinIO for free but provides some nice open source software?

Just don't judge someone too fast.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freeloader

What a weird take. Open source projects exist to be used. If you didn't want people to use it, it wouldn't be open source. As such the users are doing exactly what the creator wants: using their product. This helps the creator in many different ways.

Of course many creators are selfish. Once they have benefitted from everyone using their project they think: we want more. Then the rugpulls start. They think they no longer need their users, so now they can abuse them for additional profit.

Hey, tone down, please. Also, have you, for some reason, totally missed the first point in my comment?

> Do you know their reasons for discontinuing? Are you even entitled to know that? It's their private matter.

Fully addressed in the "if you can help it" part of my comment.

> You have no idea how entitled you behave.

I have 100% idea how entitled I behave. I don't at all. I don't use MinIO. As an employee, I push internally for relying on our own infra (but we are quite good at this already).

I don't expect open source projects to provide binaries. Well, I kinda do if they've been doing it though. Expectations vs entitlement? Not the same thing.

We're discussing human interactions and expectations here.

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So, in your opinion, what's the point of providing pre-built binaries if you don't want others to be able to rely on them then?

As someone who develops free software in my hobbies and also as an employee, if I provide binaries for free, I 100% expect people to be able to rely on them, or I just don't do it, and I would 100% feel like I'd be causing them issues by stopping doing it on short notice. I would feel like I'd owe them explanations (and their can be valid ones I'm sure - burn out would be a hell of a valid explanation to stop working on the projects at all) if I did that. They'd not be entitled to receive the binaries from me, but they would expect it and breaking expectations is not very nice. I have difficulties seeing this another way to be honest.

Let's also recall that we are talking about a project who's business might have benefited from the adoption in the first place.

> why do you care?

I could care about nothing, but that's not what I'm on HN for. I'm curious and interested.

You can read more about my views on this stuff here if it can help understand me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667271

As far as I can tell, people who are paying for support contracts were also impacted by this. It was explicitly called out in that thread

> No. There is no valid justification, and the suggestion otherwise suggests a lack of understanding of what exactly these rude individuals are demanding.

Like I said, the fact that people are human, and that minios did a thing repeatedly, is why the expectation is there. Saying it's not justified is like saying the sky isn't justified being blue, getting upset and frustrated about it is even more silly.

There's no need for people to be rude, I agree, but I don't really see any people being disproportionately rude in their comments, especially in the context of a provider who pulled part of their provisions without fair warning.

They are also, by complaining, incentivizing other people to not even offer free services in the future. Why set yourself up for accusations that you're 'breaking your social contract' or whatnot?

I do this frequently. To prevent vendor lock in and allow us to easily pivot if pricing gets out line. We pay to support the project and get technical support when needed. Considering how little we use technical support. It should be a good deal for the company.

In my experience, you start using the open source version, realize you could benefit from paid support, so you "buy a license" and get your support -- but then you never have a big enough reason to do the lift to the commercial version.

For one: Using open source version often is a lot simpler. Commercial versions are hidden behind authentication and other weird systems to download. User experience can be a lot better.

Then there are ideological reasons: Purposly trying to make the open source version sustainable.

And then reduced lockin etc. by not using Enterprise only features by accident/convenience, which leaves the door open to leave the contract.

Because I want to give a project money but also want to make 5000% sure the entire thing is in github, working, the latest, compiling and that we can do all of that all of the time? What is strange about that?

I don't see how "basic commodity required for life" is a necessary criteria for any ethical standards to apply at all. This is about trust, community and how to be a good project steward.

Electricity is not a basic commodity required for life. It is convenient for sure.

I think you are missing the point of legal vs societal obligations and your analogy is equally bad. Minio's sold you this free light bulb and they also freely offered the service to upgrade it to the newest version every time a new lightbulb was released. There are many light bulb brands out there, some paid, some free, most of them also offer the service to upgrade the lightbulb automatically, even the free ones.

Then Minio decided to disable the feature to upgrade the lightbulb automatically, the code to update it is still there, they just don't want to do it anymore. Conveniently there is a Minio+ enterprise plan that has this feature. But hey! they tell you that you can easily set up your own server to update your lightbulb automatically. And most enterprise clients or people who have Minio lightbulbs in their office will do that.

But for single enthusiasts who don't have a server because they are just running a Minio lightbulb in their shed it's a bad situation, because if they knew this from the beginning they would have gone with another free lightbulb that updated automatically.

In short: Minio has the legal right to do whatever they want, people using minio have the right to be pissed. It's an all around bad publicity stunt and if I was a Minio investor I would really wonder why they are trying to piss off their loyal user base for a quick buck.

OK - I live in a place that's snowy for a lot of the year. I shovel not only my sidewalk but my neighbours' several houses on both sides. People are really happy and grateful. Over the years Mr. Johnson the senior on a fixed pension next door loses mobility and is really appreciative I keep his walk clean. The couple next to him has a new baby and a clear sidewalk helps them load up all the accompanying gear into the car. My snowbird neighbours are happy that their walk is accessible when they're out of town. The dad who walks several kids to school is happy there's less snow to trudge through twice a day (in both directions). The mail carrier is less likely to slip and is grateful. Dog walkers and (crazy) winter joggers don't even consciously realize the improvement but still benefit.

Then I decide to stop. It doesn't really matter why, I wasn't getting paid or had not made any sort of formal agreement or promise, I just don't want to do it anymore. Now I shovel my sidewalk to the property line exactly and that's it. Hey, that's my legal obligation; I don't need to do any more! Mr. Johnson now has a lot more trouble getting out of his house; we see him a lot less. The baby is crying while new mom slips around trying to load up strollers and diaper bags and a car seat. The snowbirds just got fined by city bylaw for not clearing their walk. That dad's school trip is just a little longer, colder and unpleasant.

Hey, this isn't my fault! All those people took my effort for granted; I never promised to shovel their walks! They have no basis to judge me! But you better believe that this decision reduced their assessment that I'm a "good neighbour". Community is built mostly on implicit agreements, norms and conventions that are established through practice & conduct over time. You're arguing the right/wrong of this in the face of legal formalizations, while others are just saying it is a fact, not weighing the benefits and obligations.

Github is awash with accounts with zero contributions to anything who use it to lobby for their personal requirements.

" So offering something for free and then rescinding later is treated worse than never offering anything for free at all!"

This is true plenty of times. In particular, if you violate social expectations/etc, you will often see this.

For example, here's an easy case:

I am about to go plant a bunch of trees.

A neighbor sees me going to do it, and offers to do it for me for free, because they like to do it.

I say cool. They can even say "just so you know, i'm not your contractor, blah blah blah" or whatever. Doesn't matter.

I go do something else with my time.

A week later, they did half the job, and quit, or they did the whole job and made a hash of it, or whatever.

1. It wouldn't make sense for me to expect them to fail or stop doing it or do it poorly just because it was free. Nor plan for them to fail.

2. Most people would still complain even though they paid nothing, and are arguably no worse off (depending on the options you pick) then when they started.

3. Most people would definitely feel like it was worse than doing nothing.

Now, in this example you could argue it's the poor quality/stopping halfway through that is causing this result, but you would IMHO see the same result even if they did a great job, but stopped after doing 90% of it, leaving me definitely no worse off, and probably much better off.

In the end, people's expectations are emotional and not simply rational.

Of course they are freeloading - and users often suck - but your latter doesn't follow.

It's fair in the singular case (IE if this is the only open source/free thing you use), but especially as you are dealing with more and more things like this (IE use lots of open source), it is totally irrational to expect them to plan for any of 50 open source projects they use to stop at any time.

It violates general good faith expectations. Just because someone is doing something for free doesn't mean you expect them to fail or stop - The cost is fairly orthogonal to most people's expectations. I don't expect any package in my linux distro to just stop existing or working at any time.

Sure, it would be sensible to plan for eventual failure of things you depend on, but it's not rational to expect people to plan for random failure of any of the things they depend on at any time, regardless of the cost of those things.

More to the point, it's not entitlement on their part to avoid sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time :)

The projects also often have the perspective of "it shouldn't be tha big a thing" but that's because they ignore they are not the only thing happening in their users world.

I think you are digging in a little too hard here. If someone offers a capability that you don't have, and you build that into something you use, then saying that they should be ready for it to go away at any time and be happy to have had it, seems a little too much.

If there had never been an offer, they would not have built around it, and would have found another solution and, even if harder or more inconvenient, learned how to use that and built around that. Sure, no one is obligated to continue to provide them with the product, but saying that they are being unreasonable for expecting a little bit of warning time before having support pulled is a bit unrealistic.

I know we have done the metaphors to death already, but let's try another one: imagine if someone gave you a ride to work every day for years and one morning they didn't show up and you couldn't get in touch with them. You should have had a backup plan, and you shouldn't have depended on them, but it will take you a while to find a car and rearrange your schedule and learn how to drive or whatever you have to do, and all they had to do was notify you a month or two earlier that they wouldn't be able to do it anymore.

You're more annoying than the people you complain about.