MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO • Hacker News Board

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#21

Post by throawayonthe » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #6

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #3

I am wondering if Minio Inc has rewritten the software in a clean room. Otherwise wouldn't they need to publish the source anyways? Since it is AGPL anyone might potentially be interacting with the software. Do they do that?

The copyright for Minio consists of: - Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish - Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL. So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while…

the FSF position is that GPL is unenforceable without a single copyright owner, which is why almost all gnu projects, linux, canonical/redhat/etc projects have a CLA or something functionally similar

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#22

Post by holysoles » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

I'll plug that Chainguard has been maintaining a fork for awhile and seems to have a history with supporting forks like this: https://github.com/chainguard-forks/minio

For a web GUI, I had been using this project: https://github.com/huncrys/minio-console

I switched to rustfs this week though and am not looking back. I'd recommend it to others as well for small scale usage. Its maturing rapidly and seems promising.

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#23

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

awesan wrote: post #5

It's nice that people are taking this up, and one of the main benefits of open source in the first place. I have my doubts that this will succeed if it's just one guy, but maybe it takes on new life this way and I would never discourage people from trying to add value to this world. That said I increasingly have a very strong distaste of these AI generated articles. They are long and tedious to read and it really mak…

I agree completely. I know everyone is tired of AI accusations but this article has all of the telltale signs of LLM writing over and over again.

It’s not encouraging for the future of a project when the maintainer can’t even announce it without having AI do the work.

It would be great if this turns into a high effort, carefully maintained fork. At the moment I’m highly skeptical of new forks from maintainers who are keen on using a lot of AI.

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#24

Post by patmorgan23 » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #6

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #3

I am wondering if Minio Inc has rewritten the software in a clean room. Otherwise wouldn't they need to publish the source anyways? Since it is AGPL anyone might potentially be interacting with the software. Do they do that?

The copyright for Minio consists of: - Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish - Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL. So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while…

Doesn't that depend on the CLA?

Could you not have a CLA that only allows the project to use a specific license?

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#25

Post by paxys » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

> MinIO as an S3-compatible object store is already feature-complete. It’s finished software.

I don't see how these two lines can be written together.

The goal is either to remain S3-compatible or to freeze the current interface of the service forever.

As it stands this fork's compatibility with S3, and with the official MinIO itself, will break as soon as one of them pushes an API update. Which works fine for existing users, maybe, but over time as the projects drift further apart no new ones will be able to onboard.

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#26

Post by bigfatkitten » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

kjuulh wrote: post #10

Seems like a very balanced take on forking Minio. I don't have high hopes for the future Minio, but as mentioned it is more or less feature complete, good enough for most use-cases. I was searching for a fairly simple replacement for s3 for testing. I'd been using Minio for a while now, and simply ended up implementing my own on top of Postgres. Fun intersection given the post. (Note, I know it isn't optimal, but as…

For our needs at work (~100TB), buying Pure Storage flash arrays (hardware, software, onsite support) worked out cheaper than MinIO licensing alone.

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#27

Post by InsideOutSanta » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #20

seneca wrote: post #2

I very much appreciate the sentiment, and wish him well. However, one guy maintaining a fork as a side project from his core work is not very promising. He seems to believe AI will help lessen the burden. I hope he's able to find other maintainers. Best luck!

To be fair, most open source is like that. The most famous one I can think of right now is xz.

A vastly less complex project whose maintainer burned out. You're not wrong, but this only underlines how unsustainable this is.

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#28

Post by Macha » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

patmorgan23 wrote: post #24

Macha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright for Minio consists of: - Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish - Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL. So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while…

Doesn't that depend on the CLA? Could you not have a CLA that only allows the project to use a specific license?

You could, but the reason that companies ask for CLAs is to free themselves by that restriction.

If Minio just wanted to use the changes under AGPL, the contributor could just license them under AGPL, no CLA needed.

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#29

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

phoronixrly wrote: post #17

Macha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright for Minio consists of: - Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish - Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL. So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while…

Was going to mention the CLA. Each time you sign a CLA you're doing free work. Never do that. Keep and maintain your patches locally instead.

[deleted]

Re: MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

#30

Post by Macha » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 10:52 PM UTC

rzerowan wrote: post #18

Macha wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright for Minio consists of: - Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish - Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL. So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while…

Question , can MinIO the company assert AGPL copyright against the fork - i see in the writeup they mentioned trademarks as far as the fork is concerned. Whats the situation for a AGPL fork , were one to use it can the company assert rights like they did to Nutanix.

As long as the fork complies with the terms of the AGPL, Minio can't stop them from using the code. As the article acknowledge,s hey could potentially rely on trademarks to make them rename it.