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MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

zufallsheld

Comments (81)

  • awesan
    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 makes me doubt that what is written there is actually true at all. I much prefer a worse written but to the point article.
  • holysoles
    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/minioFor a web GUI, I had been using this project: https://github.com/huncrys/minio-consoleI 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.
  • boulos
    Maybe the author isn't aware that Chainguard is going to keep patching MinIO for CVEs:https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/secure-and-free-minio-c...You wouldn't get the other changes in this post (e.g., restoring the admin console) but that's a bit orthogonal.
  • paxys
    > 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.
  • wps
  • notpushkin
    I really really don’t like how the author spins AGPL relicensing and enforcement as an indication of project dying. AGPL is a perfectly fine license [1] for FOSS projects, and enforcing the license is a prerequisite of a healthy project. I get what he’s trying to say, but putting it all in the same category as cutting features and winding down in general feels... wrong. Trying to save a project should not be called “dying”.That said, congrats on resurrecting it![1]: The fact that big tech doesn’t want to touch it is on the big tech, not on the license!
  • ekjhgkejhgk
    > Once code is released under AGPL, the license is irrevocable. You can set a repo to read-only, but you can’t claw back a granted license.> That’s the beauty of open-source licensing by design: a company can abandon a project, but it can’t take the code with it.This is a FREE license, which is not just open source. It's open source + more.
  • Vonng
    Author here.• This is translated from my original Chinese post. I used Claude to polish the English — not a native speaker. Fair criticism on the LLM-ese; I'll tighten it.• This fork exists because MinIO is a production dep in my PG distribution (Pigsty) and I needed working binaries + CVE patches. It's primarily for my own use; sharing it because others may have the same problem.• We're deliberately conservative — no new features, just a drop-in replacement that behaves like the last OSS release with the console restored. Early commits will look thin.
  • hardwaresofton
    Please just contribute to seaweedfs or the other options instead!There are a lot of other options when it comes to locally hosted S3, minio has not been the best option for a long while.It was used the most in introductory articles/examples maybe but there were better options
  • uroni
    I never understood why one would use MinIO over Ceph for serious (multi-node) use. Sure, it might be easier to setup initially, but Ceph would be more likely to work.For the single node use-case, I'm working on https://github.com/uroni/hs5 . The S3 API surface is large, but at this point it covers the basics. By limiting the goals I hope it will be maintainable.
  • kjuulh
    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 I always have Postgres available it fits well, and I don't have high storage needs, just the api compatibility)
  • starkparker
    > A company that raised $126M at a billion-dollar valuation spent five years methodically dismantling the open-source ecosystem it built.Sounds like Puppet's story. $180M raised, ~$1B valuation ca. 2019, sold to Perforce in 2022, public repo taken private and builds commercialized by Perforce in 2024, community fork shipped early 2025.
  • Havoc
    I used S3 as a vibe code case study for whether I can just make my own. Learnings:* Yes you can absolutely spin up a DIY S3 server* When you run your server against a credible bench suite it throws a bunch of issues (ceph s3 - is disheartening 5 pass out of 800)* Vibe coding can address the core issues & make significant progress on the 800 issues. Most of those 800 don't actually matter* Low trust in resulting outcome, but I do plan on running some personal infra off DIY s3 - shopping list etc.* Planning to roll some personal infra onto said S3, but with low confidence on
  • aljarry
    There are 3 new commits, and the only actually fixes are: Go update and revert to earlier version of console.But there are a bunch of changes to docs, CI workflows and issue templates. Which is what is the easy part of managing a fork, and I've seen a bunch of forks that ended up only updating readme-s, CI, etc.I'll have more faith in the fork when the maintainers do actual fixes.
  • gbcfghhjj
    Wish the effort well. I has plans to self host s3 with minio that took some time to actually get around to and when I did they had done the enterprise rug pull. I do think one maintainer may be able to pull it off with AI assistance if the scope is limited to security bug fixes. Minio is one of the nastiest rug pulls I can think of.
  • BadBadJellyBean
    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?
  • Aurornis
    It’s nice to see people taking this on, but for a project like this I’d prefer to wait and see if the maintenance continues.This blog post is extremely heavy on LLM written content, which isn’t a promising early sign> Normally this is where the story ends — a collective sigh, and everyone moves on.> But I want to tell a different story. Not an obituary — a resurrection.I’ve seen several announcements of forked open source projects from people who thought that maintaining a fork is easy now that they can have an LLM do all the work. Then their interest trails off when they encounter problems the AI can’t handle for them or the community tires of doing all of the testing and code review for a maintainer who just wants to prompt the LLM and put their name on the project. When someone can’t even write their own announcement without an LLM it’s not an encouraging sign.
  • user3939382
    This is a super important project, I’m grateful for the commitment.
  • gionn
    How could the company behind minio not seeing this coming?
  • thayne
    > MinIO’s situation is actually more favorable — AGPL is more permissive for forks than BSL, with no legal gray area for community forks.Um what? Opentofu was forked from the last MPL version of terraform, not a BUSL licensed version. This seems like an AI hallucination.
  • maxloh
    Edit: Never mind, I comment before reading the whole post.
  • seneca
    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!
  • refulgentis
    This had a ton of LLM-ese in it, so, here's an LLM explaining it. I read it, agreed, then read it again for LLM-ese, then shared it. I recommend this pattern when using LLMs. Especially when claiming you'll replicate the role of a 9 figure company with an LLM.LLM generated TL;DR: The factual sections read like a real person who knows what they're doing. The rhetorical flourishes read like someone pasted their draft into Claude and said "make it more compelling." The work deserves better than the prose it got.LLM output given "<DOC>X</DOC> Identify parts written by an LLM"Here are the passages that read as LLM-generated rather than naturally written:*Overwrought dramatic pivots (LLMs love the "Not X — Y" antithesis):* - "Not an obituary — a resurrection." - "Not 'unmaintained' — officially, irreversibly, done." - "That demand doesn't disappear — it just finds its way out."*Explicitly labeling rhetoric that should speak for itself:* - "The ironic part:" — just show the irony, don't announce it. - "The consensus in the international community is clear:" — "international community" is overbearing. "is clear" is LLM throat-clearing. - "That's the beauty of open-source licensing by design" — "That's the beauty of" is a hallmark LLM filler phrase.*Grandiose one-liners that try too hard:* - "git clone is the most powerful spell in open source." - "a digital tombstone" - "If December was the clinical death, this February commit was the death certificate." — the metaphor was already established in the heading; extending it here is overworked.*LLM vagueness / filler:* - "Things are different now." — says nothing. - "Consider:" as a standalone transition into the Elon/Twitter example. - "I believe the maintenance workload is manageable." — the hedging "I believe" adds nothing; just say it's manageable.*Cliché deployment:* - "the dragon-slayer has become the dragon" (in the related-article blurb) - "Eating your own dog food is the best QA." — explaining the idiom ("dogfooding") one sentence before, then restating it as a maxim, is the LLM pattern of using a phrase and then making sure you understood it.*The AI-hype paragraph is the worst offender:* > "With tools like Claude Code, the cost of locating and fixing bugs in a complex Go project has dropped by *more than an order of magnitude*. What used to require a dedicated team to maintain a complex infrastructure project can now be handled by *one experienced engineer with an AI copilot*."This reads like an LLM writing about itself — vague quantification ("order of magnitude"), the buzzword "copilot," and the utopian framing are all telltale. The Elon/Twitter analogy that follows ("Consider:") makes it worse, not better.*Overall pattern:* The technical/factual sections (the timeline table, the build instructions, the console revert explanation) read like a real person. The editorializing and rhetorical flourishes — especially the intro, the "But Open Source Endures" section, and the "AI Changed the Game" section — are where the LLM voice creeps in most heavily.
  • jjzhiyuan
    [dead]
  • thenewwave
    AGPL is a plague. So many possible partners or future stewards won’t touch anything minIO with a ten foot pole unfortunately.And I say this because minIO started to actively engage on the ugly parts of the license