The $126M-funded object storage company systematically dismantled its community edition over 18 months, and the fallout is still spreading
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“THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED”
On February 12, 2026, MinIO updated the README of its flagship GitHub repository with six words in all caps: THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. The commit pointed users toward AIStor, MinIO’s commercial product. It’s now a pointer to the paid tier.
For a project with roughly 60,000 GitHub stars and over a billion Docker pulls, this was a quiet ending to a loud decade.
The README change wasn’t a surprise to anyone who’d been watching. MinIO had spent the previous 18 months systematically stripping features, pulling distribution channels, and tightening the screws on its community edition. But the finality of it still stung. Open source projects get abandoned all the time; they don’t usually get dismantled in stages by a company valued at a billion dollars.
An open-source licence isn’t a shackle, but it is a social contract.
That’s Vonng, creator of the Pigsty database distribution, writing what he called a eulogy for MinIO. He called it “even more nauseating than a crypto rug pull.”
Strong words, but the timeline supports them.
The decade that built the trust
MinIO was founded in 2014 by Anand Babu Periasamy and Harshavardhana. Periasamy was no newcomer to open source; he’d previously founded GlusterFS, the distributed filesystem that Red Hat acquired for roughly $136 million. He knew how to build an open source project, grow a community, and find an exit.
MinIO’s pitch was simple: S3-compatible object storage you could run anywhere. On-prem, in a private cloud, at the edge. It was fast, it was written in Go, and it was licensed under Apache 2.0, one of the most permissive licences in open source. Companies could use it, modify it, redistribute it, and build commercial products on top of it without worrying about copyleft obligations.
That permissiveness was the hook. It’s what drove adoption.
By 2019, MinIO had become the default self-hosted object storage for a generation of developers. Kubernetes deployments used it. CI/CD pipelines stored artefacts in it. Machine learning teams staged training data with it. The Docker Hub pull count climbed past a billion. GitHub stars accumulated into the tens of thousands.
The community didn’t just use MinIO. They evangelised the living hell out of it.
MinIO was the answer on Stack Overflow, the recommendation in Reddit threads, the first suggestion when someone asked “what’s the self-hosted S3 alternative?” That kind of organic adoption takes years to build and can’t be bought with marketing spend.
The money arrives
MinIO raised a $20 million Series A in September 2017 from Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners. Respectable, but not unusual for an infrastructure company with that level of adoption.
Then came January 2022: a $103 million Series B led by Intel Capital and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with General Catalyst following on. Total raised: $126.3 million. Reported valuation: approximately $1 billion.
Unicorn status. SoftBank on the cap table.
Note the timing. MinIO had changed its licence from Apache 2.0 to AGPL v3 roughly eight months before the Series B closed. Whether the licence change was a condition of the fundraise or merely coincidental, the sequence speaks for itself: the company tightened its licensing, then raised nine figures.
A November 2025 BusinessWire press release claimed 149% ARR growth over two years, though the base figure was never disclosed. The valuation was reportedly built more on adoption metrics (Docker pulls, GitHub stars) than on revenue. When your valuation rests on community goodwill, destroying that community carries a specific kind of risk.
The licence shift: Apache 2.0 to AGPL v3
In May 2021, MinIO relicensed under AGPL v3. The blog post framed it as a move toward openness, not away from it. AGPL is, technically, a free software licence approved by the FSF and OSI. It’s more restrictive than Apache 2.0, but it’s still open source.
The practical effect was different from the branding.
AGPL’s key provision: if you run modified AGPL software as a network service, you must make your source code available to users of that service. For cloud providers and SaaS companies building on MinIO, this created a compliance headache that Apache 2.0 never imposed. Companies that had embedded MinIO into proprietary products suddenly had to evaluate whether their usage triggered the AGPL’s network-use clause.
Some paid for a commercial licence. Some started looking for alternatives. And some, apparently, did neither.
The enforcement era
MinIO didn’t just change the licence. They enforced it, publicly and aggressively.
Nutanix (2022)
In July 2022, MinIO published a blog post accusing Nutanix of violating its open source licence in the Nutanix Objects product. This wasn’t a quiet legal letter. It was a public shaming campaign. MinIO revoked Nutanix’s licence and demanded compliance.
Nutanix apologised and came into compliance. The message to the industry was clear: MinIO would use AGPL as a weapon, and they’d do it in public.
Weka (2023)
In March 2023, MinIO made the same accusation against Weka, a competing storage company. Weka didn’t fold. They published a detailed rebuttal calling MinIO’s allegations “unfounded” and disputed the technical basis of the claims. Legal analysts noted that some of the alleged violations predated the AGPL change and fell under the original Apache 2.0 licence, which would have permitted the usage MinIO was objecting to.
The dispute settled quietly in mid-2024. But the pattern was established: MinIO was willing to publicly accuse competitors, revoke licences, and use the threat of AGPL enforcement as a commercial lever.
The AGPL wasn’t just a licence. It was a sales tool.
Companies that might have been comfortable running community MinIO under Apache 2.0 now faced a choice: pay for a commercial licence, invest in AGPL compliance, or migrate to something else entirely.
The dismantling: 2025
If the licence change and enforcement actions were the warning shots, 2025 was the artillery barrage.
Early 2025: the admin console disappears
In early 2025, MinIO stripped the admin console and management GUI from the community edition via PR #3509. The full web interface that administrators had relied on for years was replaced with a basic object browser. Bucket management, user administration, policy configuration: all gone from the free version.
Harshavardhana’s stated rationale was resource constraints: “Building and supporting separate graphical consoles for the community and commercial branches is substantial… A whole team is involved in console development alone.”
The community’s reaction was less measured. A GitHub Discussion thread with 88 upvotes captured the mood:
“Minio handled this change in the worst possible way. No announcement before the release. No warning in the initial changelog. All tickets opened regarding this were closed and locked immediately.”
Futuriom’s coverage noted the backlash was spreading across developer forums. Cloudian’s analysis pointed out that the feature removal left organisations scrambling for alternatives mid-deployment.
Jeffrey Paul, writing on sneak.berlin, was blunter: “Open core is not open source, regardless of what license they use. It’s what I’ve taken to calling ‘open source cosplay.’” He added: “They explicitly hobbled their ‘open source’ version to coerce people who don’t want to use their arcane CLI.”
October: Docker images and binaries vanish
In October 2025, MinIO stopped publishing Docker images and pre-built binaries for the community edition. The Hacker News thread drew 733 points and 555 comments.
The timing raised eyebrows. The binary removal coincided with a CVE disclosure affecting MinIO. Users who needed to patch the vulnerability couldn’t simply pull an updated Docker image; they had to build from source or migrate to AIStor. Whether this was deliberate or unfortunate timing, the effect was the same: a security vulnerability became a forcing function for commercial adoption.
One Hacker News commenter who built a cluster being expanded to roughly 100 petabytes noted that “the price of support comes in at slightly less than the equivalent amount of S3 storage, not including actual hosting costs.”
So you’d pay MinIO prices for the privilege of running your own hardware. Generous.
December: maintenance mode
On December 3, 2025, MinIO placed the community repository in “maintenance mode.” The Hacker News discussion hit 511 points and 322 comments. InfoQ covered the shift and the growing search for S3-compatible alternatives.
A Medium post framing it as a wake-up call for the CNCF ecosystem gained traction. On Reddit’s r/selfhosted, users warned others to avoid MinIO entirely, with one popular thread calling the changes a “trojan horse.”
February 2026: the final commit
Then came the README update. Six words in all caps. A link to AIStor. Chapter closed.
The escalation ladder
What makes MinIO’s trajectory unusual isn’t any single decision. It’s the cumulative escalation. Other companies have changed licences. Others have created commercial-only features. MinIO did all of that, then kept going.
| Level | Action | MinIO | MongoDB | Elastic | HashiCorp | Redis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Licence change (copyleft) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| 2 | Licence change (source-available) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| 3 | Feature stripping from community edition | ✅ | ||||
| 4 | Distribution restriction (Docker/binary removal) | ✅ | ||||
| 5 | Repository abandonment | ✅ | ||||
| 6 | Security leverage (CVE timing) | ✅ |
MinIO is the only company that climbed all six levels.
MongoDB changed to SSPL in 2018 and stopped there. The business thrived. Elasticsearch went to SSPL and Elastic Licence in 2021, AWS forked it into OpenSearch, and Elastic actually reversed course in August 2024, returning to AGPL. HashiCorp moved to BSL in 2023, spawning the OpenTofu fork, then got acquired by IBM for $6.4 billion. Redis switched to RSALv2/SSPLv1 in 2024, and the Linux Foundation launched Valkey with backing from AWS, Google, and Oracle.
Each of those companies made a single controversial move and dealt with the consequences. MinIO made six, each one burning more trust than the last.
Every other company in this pattern changed the rules. MinIO changed the rules, then removed the pieces from the board.
The pricing wall
MinIO’s answer for displaced community users was AIStor, their commercial product.
The minimum annual commitment for AIStor Enterprise: $96,000. Cloudian’s breakdown puts the cost at $96,000 per year for the base tier, rising to $244,032 per year for a petabyte of storage. That’s software and support alone, before you account for the hardware to run it on.
For enterprises already running MinIO at scale, this might be a reasonable line item. For the thousands of smaller teams, startups, and self-hosters who adopted MinIO precisely because it was free and capable, $96,000 isn’t a migration path.
It’s a cliff.
MinIO seemed to recognise this. In December 2025, they added an “Enterprise Lite” tier, suggesting the $96K minimum was losing them the mid-market. But by then, trust was already gone.
| Tier | Annual cost | Target |
|---|---|---|
| AIStor Enterprise | $96,000+ | Large organisations |
| AIStor Enterprise (1 PB) | $244,032 | Storage-heavy deployments |
| Enterprise Lite (Dec 2025) | Undisclosed | Mid-market (damage control?) |
| Community edition | Free (discontinued) | Everyone else (abandoned) |
The VC equation
$126.3 million doesn’t come without strings.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 is not a patient capital partner. Their portfolio companies are expected to grow aggressively and find a path to profitability or exit. When you raise at a billion-dollar valuation, you need revenue to justify that number. MinIO’s massive community adoption, the billion Docker pulls, the 60,000 GitHub stars; those metrics got them the valuation. But metrics don’t pay back investors. Revenue does.
The sequence is instructive:
- 2021: Licence change to AGPL (eight months before Series B closes)
- 2022: Series B raises $103M at ~$1B valuation
- 2022-2023: Aggressive public enforcement against Nutanix and Weka
- 2025: Feature stripping, binary removal, maintenance mode
- 2026: Repository abandoned, all roads lead to AIStor
Each step ratcheted the pressure on free users to convert to paid customers. The AGPL change made it legally risky to use MinIO in commercial settings without paying. The enforcement actions demonstrated willingness to litigate. The feature stripping made the free version less useful. The binary removal made it harder to run. And the final abandonment left no option at all.
Periasamy has done this before. GlusterFS grew as an open source project, built a community, and was acquired by Red Hat for $136 million. That was a clean exit; the community continued under Red Hat’s stewardship. The MinIO playbook looks different: instead of finding a buyer who values the community, the company appears to be converting community goodwill directly into commercial revenue by eliminating the free alternative.
The community responds
Open source communities are resilient. They also have long memories.
The alternatives
Several projects are positioning themselves as MinIO replacements:
| Project | Language | Approach | S3 compatible | Maturity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SeaweedFS | Go | Distributed file + object storage | ✅ | Production-ready |
| Garage | Rust | Lightweight, geo-distributed | ✅ | Stable |
| RustFS | Rust | MinIO-inspired rewrite | ✅ | Early stage |
| Ceph (RADOS Gateway) | C++ | Full-featured, complex | ✅ | Mature |
None of these are direct forks of MinIO. RustFS is a ground-up Rust rewrite inspired by MinIO’s design, not a code fork. When Redis changed its licence, the Linux Foundation launched Valkey as a direct fork with corporate backing from AWS, Google, and Oracle. When HashiCorp went to BSL, OpenTofu forked the last MPL-licensed version. MinIO’s AGPL licensing and the complexity of its codebase have made a direct fork less attractive, so the community is rebuilding rather than forking.
The anger
The community response has been less about finding alternatives and more about the way MinIO handled the transition. The GitHub Discussion complaint about locked tickets and silent releases keeps surfacing. On LinkedIn, users like Laurenceau noted that “over the past year, MinIO has taken increasingly aggressive steps to restrict the use of their Community Edition.”
The Hacker News threads are revealing. One commenter captured the philosophical divide: “Open source projects eventually need a path to monetization.” The rebuttal was immediate: “I don’t see anything in there about ‘except for business purposes’… It seems like a lot of these ‘open core’ cloud companies just have a fundamental misunderstanding about what free software is.”
That tension, between the practical need for revenue and the social contract of open source, sits at the centre of every one of these disputes. But MinIO’s handling of it was uniquely clumsy. Other companies at least announced their changes in advance, offered migration paths, or maintained the community edition in a reduced capacity. MinIO closed tickets, locked discussions, and removed binaries while a security vulnerability was still unpatched.
Pattern recognition: the open source bait-and-switch playbook
MinIO isn’t the first company to monetise an open source project by restricting the free version. But looking at the pattern across multiple companies reveals something about where the industry is heading.
The standard playbook has three phases:
Phase 1: Build. Release under a permissive licence. Grow adoption. Accumulate GitHub stars, Docker pulls, community contributors. Use these metrics to raise venture capital.
Phase 2: Monetise. Change the licence to something more restrictive. Create a commercial edition with premium features. Hire a sales team. Start converting free users to paid customers.
Phase 3: Restrict. If conversion rates disappoint (and they usually do, because free users chose the free version because it was free), start removing features from the community edition to widen the gap between free and paid.
Most companies stop at Phase 2. MongoDB, Elastic, HashiCorp, and Redis all changed their licences but maintained functional community editions. Elastic went further and actually reversed its licence change when the competitive dynamics shifted.
MinIO went through Phase 3 and kept going into territory no other major open source company has entered: pulling distribution channels, abandoning the repository, and allegedly timing security disclosures to coincide with commercial pressure.
The question isn’t whether open source companies can monetise. It’s whether the community will trust the next one that tries.
Open source dependency risk
If you’re running MinIO in production today, you have a very concrete problem: the software you depend on is no longer maintained, and the company that built it wants $96,000 a year for the replacement.
The broader lesson extends beyond MinIO.
Licence permissiveness is not a guarantee of continuity. MinIO started under Apache 2.0, one of the most permissive licences available. That didn’t prevent the company from changing the licence, stripping features, and eventually abandoning the project. The licence protects your right to use the existing code; it doesn’t obligate anyone to keep developing it.
Adoption metrics can work against you. MinIO’s billion Docker pulls and 60,000 GitHub stars were used to raise $126 million in venture capital. That capital came with growth expectations that the community edition couldn’t satisfy. The very popularity that made MinIO valuable as a project made it a target for monetisation pressure.
Watch the cap table. When a growth-stage VC fund like SoftBank invests in an open source company, the incentive structure shifts. Patient capital (foundations, strategic investors, bootstrapping) tends to align with long-term community health. Growth capital demands returns on a timeline that community goodwill can’t always deliver.
The CNCF badge isn’t a safety net. MinIO was a CNCF-associated project. That association didn’t prevent any of this. The CNCF doesn’t control the licensing or business decisions of associated projects. If your risk model assumes that CNCF membership means long-term stability, MinIO is your counterexample.
For engineering teams evaluating open source dependencies, the MinIO saga suggests a few practical questions:
- Who funds this project, and what do they expect in return?
- Is the project governed by a foundation, or controlled by a single company?
- What’s the licence history? Has it changed before?
- Are there viable alternatives if this project changes direction?
- Could you build from source if distribution channels disappeared?
None of these questions would have saved you from MinIO’s specific trajectory. But they might help you see the next one coming.
The road from here
MinIO’s community edition is dead. The company has made that unambiguous. What remains is AIStor, a commercial product priced for enterprises, and a GitHub repository with a README in all caps.
The alternatives are maturing. SeaweedFS has production deployments. Garage is finding its niche in geo-distributed setups. RustFS is early but growing. None of them have MinIO’s decade of battle-testing, but none of them have MinIO’s baggage either.
For the open source ecosystem, MinIO joins a growing list of cautionary examples. But it stands apart in one respect: the thoroughness of the dismantling. Other companies changed the terms. MinIO burned the bridge, pulled up the road behind it, and posted a toll booth on the other side.
Periasamy built GlusterFS and sold it to Red Hat for $136 million. The community continued under new stewardship. With MinIO, the community got a README in all caps and a link to the pricing page.
That difference tells you everything about what changed between the two exits. The first time, the acquirer valued the community.
This time, the company decided the community was the product.
References
- Vonng, “MinIO is dead” – Detailed technical post-mortem with timeline and community perspective from the Pigsty founder
- InfoQ, “MinIO S3 API alternatives” – Balanced coverage of the maintenance mode announcement and the alternatives emerging
- Jeffrey Paul, “MinIO are assholes” – Sharp critique of the open core model and MinIO’s specific implementation of it
- HN thread on Docker image removal (733 points) – Community reaction to binary removal, including the 100PB cluster operator’s cost analysis
- HN thread on maintenance mode (511 points) – Broader discussion of open source sustainability and MinIO’s place in the pattern
- BusinessWire Series B announcement – Original press release on the $103M raise and SoftBank involvement
- Bayave legal analysis of MinIO vs Weka – Detailed examination of the licence enforcement claims and their legal basis
- CNCF ecosystem wake-up call – Analysis of what MinIO’s trajectory means for CNCF project governance
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