MinIO GitHub Repository in Maintenance Mode: What’s Next for the Open Source Object Storage?

After a contentious license change and the removal of administrator functionalities from the console, the company behind the popular open-source object storage server Minio recently announced that the project will now enter maintenance mode. The change has raised discussion in the community about the need for a fork, the challenges of open source projects, and the viability of Garage, SeaweedFS, and other alternatives.

According to the latest commit in the public GitHub repository, no new features, enhancements, or pull requests will be accepted in the MinIO community edition, and critical security fixes will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Existing issues and pull requests will not be actively reviewed, with community support continuing on Slack on a best-effort basis, and the company encouraging users to migrate to MinIO Enterprise.

Started over a decade ago, MinIO gained popularity among developers thanks to its full compatibility with the Amazon S3 APIs, which are the de facto standard for object storage. Developers could use existing S3 SDKs, tools, and libraries, with easy migration from AWS S3 or multi-cloud setups. Compared to other solutions, including Ceph and traditional SAN/NAS, MinIO is known for its simplicity, as it runs as a single binary with minimal dependencies. Furthermore, MinIO integrates with tools such as Terraform, Spark, Kafka, and Velero, as well as popular ML frameworks.

With MinIO running today behind many Kubernetes clusters, SaaS platforms, and data lakes, Mangla Ram Choudhary, software engineer at Aquila I, summarizes:

A silent README update just ended the era of MinIO as the default open-source S3 engine (…) No announcement. No migration guidance. Just switched off (…) Why This Matters: security non-compliance for SOC2/ISO/PCI/HIPAA, architectural risk at the storage layer, zero community contribution path, forced move to commercial licensing or migration. This is a major open-source infrastructure event, not just project news.

With MinIO open source dead, there have been multiple discussions on LinkedIn and Reddit on alternatives and “who will now take the crown of open source S3 compatible storage.” In the “Life After MinIO: Community Insights & Migration Strategy” article, Alexey Minin, senior DevOps engineer at Rulauda, highlights a common problem with open source software:

In 2025, “Open Source” isn’t enough. We need to look for Open Governance. Projects hosted by foundations (CNCF, Apache, Linux Foundation) are immune to these rug-pulls. Single-vendor projects are not.

Among popular object storage alternatives are RustFS, SeaweedFS, and Garage, with Garage released under the AGPLv3 license and SeaweedFS and RustFS under the Apache 2.0 license. Highlighting the importance of sustainability and permissive licenses for enterprises, user victormy comments on Hacker News:

Big thanks to MinIO, RustFS, and Garage for their contributions. That said, MinIO closing the door on open source so abruptly definitely spooked the community. But honestly, fair play to them — open source projects eventually need a path to monetization (…) With MinIO effectively bowing out of the OSS race, my money is on RustFS to take the lead.

While Garage focuses on being an S3-compatible object store for small, self-hosted, geo-distributed deployments, RustFS focuses on raw performance and optimization for data lakes, AI, and big data workloads. According to the documentation, RustFS supports migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph. Written in Go, SeaweedFS is a distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lakes. Robert Hodges, CEO at Altinity, suggests an “open source mystery” and questions:

There are easy-to-deploy, open source builds for practically every major database type but not for S3-compatible object storage. Shouldn’t there be a PostgreSQL for S3?

So far, no fork of the MinIO community edition has gained traction.