MinIO

Details

The FOSS code is provided under an AGPLv3 license. They also appear to sell a “commercial license” but the specific terms of this could not be found on their website or repository. The project website appears to strongly advertise and sell “MinIO AIStor”, but the specific relation of this to the FOSS and “commercial license” is unclear based on the website content. Within their license compliance information, they also refer to a “Enterprise Object Store”:

The Enterprise Object Store offering is designed for mission critical environments where both a license and strict SLAs are required. Commercial version includes all of the Enterprise Object Store features, a four hour SLA, Indemnification, optional annual architecture and security reviews, unlimited panic buttons and other benefits that are detailed in the Enterprise License and Subscription Agreement.

When running the open source version, branding appeared as “MinIO Object Store Community Edition”, adding yet another name. Overall, it’s quite unclear what the offerings actually are as many different names are used across their guidance, and there does not appear to be any provided detailed comparisons, until you actually run the application where the “License” page provides a table comparison, at least between “MinIO Object Store Community Edition” and “MinIO AIStor”.

Their advertising of open source on their website does appear to be specific to their FOSS-code offering, with distribution provided via “Open Source” specific labelled routes, and a test of a downloaded binary here advertised its license as AGPLv3 in its version output.

While the project does not specifically have a CLA, to hand over relicensing rights, for their dual-licensed AGPLv3 set-up they effectively achieve the same result by requiring community contributions to be provided under an Apache 2 license, therefore washing contributions through an extra license change.

The project has appeared somewhat aggressive when it comes to licensing, as reflected in a conflict with Weka, where they believed they could revoke Weka’s use of the Apache and AGPLv3 license terms under questionable reasoning. Weka Response, Minio follow-up.

In May of 2025 Minio released an update which removed a lot of UI functionality from their FOSS offering, upsetting a significant part of their FOSS user-base.

The project appears to have raised at least $126m in funding from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, General Catalyst, Nexus Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Index Ventures, Mark Leslie, Brian Stevens, Ben Golub, Lanham Napier, Andrew Feldman, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Steve Singh. They also appear to gain revenue from selling their “AIStor”/“commercial license” versions and/or licensing options for the software along with support services provided in those offerings.