Interesting articles here and here from this June about the negative reaction from the community about removing functions from the open core company’s open source version.

“The adjustment eliminated the Web-based UI that made it easy to manage administrative functions such as policies, real-time monitoring, and replication controls.” One commentator said the changes “gutted” the open source version.

MinIO responded that it did not want to continue to support the Web UI.

The article reports that competitors are taking advantage of the negative reaction to promote their own alternatives.

Companies that run open core licensing models walk a fine line between community and monetization. Moving functionality out of a community edition risks alienating the company’s open source followers, and devaluing the branding capital that open source can provide.

The article compares this move to those of Cockroach and Hashicorp, which were actually much more significant relicensing moves. But it points out a key similarity. Community members don’t like having free features taken away from them. Overall, it’s better to avoid removing functionality from open source editions once it’s there. An open core licensing model can fail when community features start disappearing or being deprecated. Community members can be more tolerant of a feature being designated as proprietary from the beginning, because they will not come to rely on its being freely available.