Beware the AGPL! you may end with a product orphan from its S3 storage…
MinIO has long been a popular open-source S3-compatible storage solution, but their strategy has shifted dramatically—especially since the release of their new AIstor product, now positioned as their main enterprise S3 offering. Over the past year, MinIO has taken increasingly aggressive steps to restrict the use of their Community Edition in production, pushing users toward commercial licensing or fear legal issues through AGPL license.
Worryingly, MinIO has also started removing existing features from the Community Edition. Recently all administration features were removed from the minio community UI. Their public catalog suggests that even more removals are likely, with critical capabilities such as site replication, security, and encryption potentially on the chopping block. This is a significant departure from the open-source spirit that originally made MinIO attractive.
Key discussions and issues highlight this strategy:
- MinIO’s official stance on production use of the Community Edition
- Clarification from MinIO maintainers on licensing and production use
- Community pushback and MinIO’s responses
- Detailed discussion on the future of the Community Edition
If you’re looking for open-source S3-compatible storage with more permissive licenses, consider these alternatives:
- SeaweedFS (Apache License) -> young & personal favorite
- Ceph (LGPL) -> battle tested but needs a lot infrastucture
- Apache Ozone (Apache License) -> young but nice if you’re heading for big data and data crunching with spark
Reminder on open-source licenses:
- LGPL: You can link against and don’t have to release source code as long as you don’t modify the library itself.
- GPL: You have to release source code if you link against and distribute the binary, but not if you just provide a service.
- AGPL: You have to allow the source to be downloaded even if you never distribute the binary but do provide a service.
This is a pivotal moment for the open-source storage ecosystem. If you rely on MinIO Community Edition, now is the time to review your options and understand the licensing implications. Note the pricing for Minio scales in $/TiB/Year and then very expensive for large volume of data. Public price https://min.io/pricing is ~ $250k/PB/year and minimal setup is $96k/year.
Last year another storage solution that I liked a lot : ScyllaDB also decided to phase out their Community Edition and keep only the Enterprise Edition under the AGPL license. MinIO is now heading in the same direction.
Thanks Joël Séguillon for the issues
The browser was forked here : https://github.com/OpenMaxIO/openmaxio-object-browser it does not remove the AGPL contraint, but the feature are back
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