Hacker News Reader

Comment by MuteXR | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind this is the same project that removed all useful functionality from the included web UI in the community edition with the excuse that it was too much effort to maintain.

This is another case of VC-funded companies pulling up the ladder behind themselves.

View on HN

Is it an excuse? Maintaining code costs money, and the previous versions are provided under the license, and you're free to modify it, pull selective patches and maintain them yourself. While It'd be convenient if the license was a promise to develop and maintain features for free in perpetuity, it just isn't.

I run into this in non-company backed open source projects all the time too. Some maintainer gets burned out or non-interested and all they're rewarded is people with pitchforks because they thought there were some sort of obligations to provide free updates and suppport

It's different as a) they did offer it for free and b) have to maintain it for the closed version.

However, this is also a classic move, so shouldn't be unexpected behavior these days...

It is sort of an excuse. I don't use MinIO precisely because of this kind of behaviour - if I cannot easily develop, configure and test our applications, I'm not adopting it commercially, specially when there are a ton of options to choose from. In the end, this hurts the MinIO's enterprise offering. Having a robust, easy to deploy community edition, with predictable features, is a great way of allowing integrators to develop and test using your product, and to help the product to gain traction.

Conversely, if instead of making your users happy to pay you, you've made them happy to use your stuff for free, you own the consequences when you stop giving that stuff away.

Welcome to HN BTW, I see you were inspired to sign up and defend the project owner.

These are the same people who get mad at Red Hat because they think the 5K people who develop, maintain, and test all of the software do it for free

I understand the frustration; however using anything VC-funded, you are not paying for, is pretty risky.

It would be useful to have some kind of future feasibility risk analysis service for open third party dependencies.

Something that can be plugged into CI.

Perhaps something like this already exists?

It's still risky if you pay unless you have a contract guaranteeing what the renewal price would be.

What ladder are they pulling up? Feel free to fork the last valid commit and make a competitor.

The ladder is still there! See that pile of wood there? That's where we put the rungs. And if dig in that hole over there you might even find the extension we removed last week...

How was the task of building this project easier for them than it would now be for you or me? I feel like you are using the phrase “pulling up the ladder” in a way that doesn’t track with common usage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com