Didn't contribute to MinIO, but if they accepted external contributions without making them sign a CLA, they cannot change the license without asking every external contributor for consent to the license change. As it is AGPL, they still have to provide the source code somewhere.

IANAL, of course

They required a "Community Contribution License" in each PR description, which licensed each contribution under Apache 2 as an inbound license.

Meanwhile, MinIO's own contributions and the distribution itself (outbound license) were AGPL licensed.

It's effectively a CLA, just a bit weaker, since they're still bound by the terms of Apache 2 vs. a full license assignment like most CLAs.

People underestimate the amount of fakeness a lot of these "open-core/source" orgs have. I guarantee from day one of starting the MinIO project, they had eyes on future commercialization, and of course made contributors sign away their rights knowing full well they are going to go closed source.

Well, you can not have a product without having "AI" somewhere in the name anymore. It's the law.

back in 2018, it didn't feel this way

This is why I don't bother with AGPL released by a company (use or contribute).

Choosing AGPL with contributors giving up rights is a huge red flag for "hey, we are going to rug pull".

Just AGPL by companies without even allowing contributor rights is saying, "hey, we are going to attempt to squeeze profit out and don't want competition on our SaaS offering."

I wish companies would stop trying to get free code out of the open source community. There have been so many rug pulls it should be expected now.

What's the problem? Surely people will fork it

I still don't understand what the difference is.

What is an AI Stor (e missing on purpose because that is how it is branded: https://www.min.io/product/aistor)

Might be because of this other storage product named that https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore

Does anyone use this? I was setting it up a few months ago but it felt very complicated compared to MinIO (or alternatives). Is there a sort of minikube-like tool I could use here?

There's a development/playground deployment for local K8s (e.g. Minikube, KinD): https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore/tree/main/deploy/dev/k8s.

For production you'd need a proper cluster deployed via Helm, but for trying it out locally that setup is easy to get running.

It can store things for AI workloads (and non-AI workloads, but who’s counting…)

About a billion dollars difference in valuation up until the bubble pops.

Looks like AI slop

    Replication

    A trusted identity provider is a
    key component to single sign on.

Uh, what?

It’s probably just Minio but it costs more money.