Comment by mattbee

Maybe someone else somewhere is getting some unbelievably sweet deal but what I've seen from cloud discounting is more in the "single digit percentage" range than "2/3rds off" or something.

How to not pay full price on AWS? We pay $10K+ per month and nobody gives us any discount.

I guess it's a good thing I'm not talking about list price. Do you really think when you're doing a cost comparison of AWS S3 to NetApp or Dell object storage a fortune 500 says: go ahead and use list pricing for the comparison? We plug in their existing discount structure... because otherwise it would be a rather pointless exercise for everyone involved.

Agreed and for most smaller use cases theres always b2 from Backblaze.

Is anyone getting discounts on S3? There's easy ways to save on compute like reserved instances but I haven't found anything for storage other than the tiering system.

That, in itself, should be plenty of reason to stay the hell away from it.

free software until mainstream acceptance. naive MBAs call it leaving money on the table, Microsoft calls it a monopoly-preserving strategy. no VC has the balls to go for the jugular anymore.

Is open source and making money in conflict? If they do a good job, I am willing to pay.

it used to be that people started businesses so that they could help others by providing a product or a service to them.

late stage capitalism arrives when people create businesses solely to get rich, and when other companies are created solely to get rich by helping those people create their companies so that they can get rich. that's what ycombinator is.

most of capitalism used to be symbiotic. engaging in transactions with businesses benefited both the business and the consumer.

now we live in a world where most or all of the benefit goes to the business and none or almost none to the consumer.

Here an S3 compatibility table https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/documentation/reference-manua... comparing

  - GarageFS 
  - OpenStack Swift
  - CEPH Object Gateway Rados
  - Riak CS
  - OpenIO

The benchmark against MinIO is nice, but I don't care much for the table vs. "Other object storage" which seems to try to aggregate all the worst points of all the others with no citation (e.g. why should I believe RustFS has no intellectual property risk but others do? What's different about them to back that up?).

This comparison reads like it was written by an adolescent. The first row immediately reminded me of the classic meme[1]

[1] https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/460629937/our-blessed-homel...

There are a few challenges with open-source projects that want to also be commercial entities.

One is obviously knowing what you can add-on that people will pay for; support, for one, but people want more features too. What could minio have built on top of their product to sell to people? Presumably some kind of S3-style tiered storage system, replication, a good UI, whatever else, I'm not sure.

The second is getting people to actually know that that's an issue. I work for Tigera which publishes the Calico CNI for Kubernetes, and one of the biggest issues we have is that people set up Calico on their clusters, configure it, and then just never think about it again. A testament to the quality of the product, I'm sure, but it makes it difficult to get people to even know we have a commercial offering, let alone what it is and does and why it might be beneficial.

I could see the same thing for Minio; even if they have a great OSS product, a great commercial offering on top of that, and great support, getting people to even be aware of it in the first place is going to be a huge challenge and getting people to pay for it is even harder.

It's sad that they went the completely wrong direction and started taking things away from the community to force people to the commercial side of things whether they're willing to pay or not.

I reckon they gave away too much, and are clumsily rowing it back.

Gitlab seemed to do a good job of navigating a community edition as an on-ramp for sales. But it's obviously a lot of work to maintain that edition, and VC must be feeling less geenerous than 10-15 years ago.

e.g. maybe if it were my project I'd have kept back the S3-compatible ACL support and put in something super-basic. Or even cluster support. Right now it feels like they're cutting off everything they can while still being able to call it "open source".

An analogy to making a physical tool doesn’t really work because we have to basically describe what software is in terms of exceptions to the analogy.

If I had a ratchet that, every time I turned it, I had to pay $.1, but I’d gotten it for free, but it was basically free to replicate, but the person who designed it did have to spend some significant work on R&D for the thing… I have no idea how I’d price that or how I’d feel.

did you buy the ratchet?

that's why you'd be pissed.

Let me introduce you to Splunk and enterprise software in general

You effectively do pay per turn of the ratchet. It doesn't last forever, will eventually break, and so you can amortize the cost of the device over the number of turns you expect it to make to get the per-turn cost.

Software on the other hand does not naturally wear out, in the same way physical objects do.

Nuantrix distributed a version that was still Apache licensed and merely failed to disclose they had made changes.

This is after MinIO asserted that Weka had also stolen their AGPL-licensed code, showing that they extracted binaries from the distribution. They forgot that that 3-month old (unmodified) version was still Apache licensed though.

MinIO generally don't seem to consult lawyers often. They haven't even set up copyright assignment / CLA immediately after switching the license, so technically they are also incapable of selling AGPL license exceptions just like everyone else.

I've done my best to keep MinIO away from most infra I manage, not because of legal concerns but because it was kind of obvious they'd eventually go full scorched earth and either drop images or the source code distribution all together. Maybe now we can all move on to a fork, or SeaweedFS, or Ceph, or literally anything else.

That just means the fork would also need to be AGPL licensed, and the owner of the fork wouldn't be able to also sell a proprietary version with additional "enterprise" features. And IMO that would be a good thing.

I think it is unlikely a single entity would do that. But a coalition of current MinIO users might get together to create such a project, perhaps under the Auspices of a foundation such as the Linux Foundation. Although, I think that scenario would be more similar to OpenTofu than Valkey.

maybe they got paid in exposure

It can be correct and true while at the same time being bad-faith and user-hostile.