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Comment by n4bz0r | Hacker News Reader

Getting into S3 myself and really curious about what Garage has to offer vs the more mature alternatives like Minio. From what I gather, it kinda works better with small (a few kilobytes) files or something?

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Minio recently started removing features from the community version. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136108

How awful. It seems to be a pattern nowadays?

Some former colleagues still using gitlab ce tell me they also removed features from their self-hosted version, particularly from their runners.

Yeah, there's a trend of people who don't actually believe in software freedoms releasing a subset of their proprietary software under free software licenses and pretending.

It's really just a bait and switch to try to get free community engagement around a commercial product. It's fundamentally dishonest. I call it "open source cosplay". They're not real open source projects (in the sense that if you write a feature under a free software license that competes with their paid proprietary software, there's zero percent chance it will be upstreamed, even if all of the users of the project want it) so they shouldn't get the credit for being such just because they slapped a free software license on a fraction of their proprietary code.

Invariably they also want contributors to sign a rights-assignment CLA so they can reuse free software contributions (that they didn't pay for) in their for-profit proprietary project. Never sign a CLA that assigns rights.

Some open source projects flat-out illegally "relicensed" open source contributions as a proprietary license when they wanted to start selling software (CapRover). Some just start removing features or refuse to integrate features (Minio, Mattermost, etc). Many (such as Minio) use nonfree fake open source licenses like the AGPL[1].

It's all a scam by people who don't care about software freedoms. If you believe in software freedoms, you never release any software that isn't free software.

[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/

> the anti-privacy misfeature the AGPL requires that the software furnish its own source code to users over the network

This statement in the linked article is incorrect. It overlooks the "through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software" clause in section 12.

The software does not have to provide the source code _itself_. It must provide users a reference to such. A link to the Github repository on the about page, for example, would fulfill the requirement.

I loved minio until they silently removed 99% of the admin UI to push users towards the paid offering. It just disappeared one day after fetching the new minio images. The only evidence of the change online was discussions by confused users in the GitHub issues

I have also been considering this for some time. Been comparing MinIO, Garage, and Ceph. MinIO may not be wise given their recent moves, as another commenter noted. Garage seems ok but their git doesn’t show much activity these days so I wonder if it too will be abandoned. Which leaves us with Ceph. May have a higher learning curve but also offers the most flexibility as one can do object as well as block and file. Gonna set up a single node with 9 OSD’s soon and give it a go but always looking for input if anyone would like to provide some.

If I can reassure you about Garage, it's not at all abandoned. We have active work going on to make a GUI for cluster administration, and we have applied for a new round of funding for more low-level work on performance, which should keep us going for the next year or so. Expect some more activity in the near future.

I manage several Garage clusters and will keep maintaining the software to keep these clusters running. But concerning the "low level of activity in the git repo": we originally built Garage for some specific needs, and it fits these needs quite well in its current form. So I'd argue that "low activity" doesn't mean it's not reliable, in fact it's the contrary: low activity means that it works well for us and there isn't a need to change anything.

Of course implementing new features is another deal, I personally have only limited time to spend on implementing features that I don't need myself. But we would always welcome outside contributions of new features from people with specific needs.

I appreciate the response! Thanks for the update. I will continue keeping an eye on the project then and possibly giving it a try. I have read the docs and was considering setting it up across two sites. The implementation seemed address this pain point with distributed storage solutions and latency.

I've used Ceph in a home lab setting for 9 years or so now. Since cephadm is has gotten even easier to manage even though it really was never that hard. A few pointers. No SMR drives, they have such bad performance that they can periodically drop out of the cluster. Second, no consumer SSDs/NVMe devices. You need power loss prevention on your drives. Ceph directly writes to the drive, it ignores cache, without PLP you may literally have slower performance than rust.

You also want fast networking, I just use 10Gbps. My nodes each are 6 rust and 1 NVMe drive each, 5 nodes. I colocate my MONs and MDS daemons with my OSDs, each node has 64GB of RAM and I use around 40GB.

Usage is RDB for a three node OpenStack cluster, and CephFS. I have about 424TiB between rust and NVMe raw.

The point about smr drives cannot be stressed enough.

Smr drives are absolutly shit-tier choice in terms of drives.

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