Comment by st3fan

3 months ago

What a story. EOL the open source foundation of your commercial product, to which many people contributed, to turn it into a closed source "A-Ff*ing-I Store" .. seriously what the ...

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.

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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.

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)