MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO · Vonng

I forked Minio, restored the admin console, rebuilt the binary distribution pipeline and brought it back to life.

If you’re running MiniIO, swap minio/minio For pgsty/minio. Everything else remains the same. (The CVE is fixed, and the console GUI is back!)

death certificate#

On December 3, 2025, Minio announced “maintenance mode” on GitHub. I wrote about it in Minio Is Dead.

On February 12, 2026, Minio updated the repo status to “Maintenance Mode”. “No more maintenance”Then officially archived the repository. read only. No PR, no issue, no contributions accepted. A project with 60 thousand stars and over a billion Docker pulls became a digital tombstone.

If December was clinical death, this February was commitment death certificate.

Today (February 14), a widely circulated article titled How Minio turned from open source darling to cautionary tale revealed the full timeline.

Percona founder Peter Zaitsev also raised concerns about the sustainability of open-source infrastructure on LinkedIn. The consensus in the international community is clear: MiniIO is done.

Not “uncorrected” – Officially, irrevocably, done.

If we look at the time period of the last 18 months, this was not a sudden death. It was a slow, deliberate decline:

A company that raised $126 million at a billion-dollar valuation spent five years systematically destroying the open-source ecosystem it built.

But open source persists#

Usually the story ends here – a collective sigh, and everyone moves on.

But I want to tell a different story. Not an obituary – a resurrection.

Minio Inc. One can archive the repo, but they cannot archive the rights that the AGPL gives the community.

Ironically, AGPL was Minio’s own choice. They switched from Apache 2.0 to the AGPL to use it as leverage in their disputes with Nutanix and Weka – maintaining the “open source” label while adding enforcement teeth. But open-source licenses cut both ways – that same license now guarantees the community’s right to fork.

Once code is released under the AGPL, the license is irrevocable. You can set the repo to be read-only, but you cannot revoke the granted license.

That’s the beauty of open-source licensing by design: A company can leave a project, but it can’t take the code with it.

so – Minio is dead, but Minio can come back to life.

That said, forking is the easy part. Anyone can click the fork button. The real question is not “can we fork it” but “Can anyone really maintain this as a production component?”

I didn’t set out to get it. But after Minio entered maintenance mode, I waited a few weeks for someone in the community to step forward. Nobody did. So I did it myself.

Some background: I maintain Pigsty – a battery-included PostgreSQL distribution with 451 extensions, cross-built to 14 Linux distros. I also maintain 270+ PG extensions, multiple PG forks, and build pipelines for dozens of Go projects (Victoria, Prometheus, etc.) on all major platforms. Adding another one to the pipeline was an easy task.

I’m not new to Minio either. In 2018, we ran an internal Minio fork at Tantan (when it was still Apache 2.0), managing ~25 PB of data – one of the earliest and largest Minio deployments in China at the time.

More importantly, Minio is a real (optional) module in Pigsty. Many users run it as the default backup repository for PostgreSQL in production.

It was not optional – it had to be done. When Minio announced maintenance mode in early December 2025, I had already created CVE-patched binaries myself.

pgsty/minio release.2025-12-03T12-00-00Z

what have we done#

As of today, three things.

1. Reinstalled Admin Console#

This was the change that disappointed the community the most.

In May 2025, Minio removed the full admin console from the Community Edition, leaving behind a bare-bones object browser. User management, bucket policies, access control, lifecycle management – ​​everything was gone overnight. Do you want them back? Pay for the Enterprise Edition. (~$100,000)

We brought it back.

The irony is that it didn’t even require reverse engineering. you just return it minio/console Submodule in previous version. In fact, Minio did just that – they swapped out a dependency version to replace the full console with a stripped-down console. The code was always there.

We put it back.

2. Reconstructed Binary Distribution#

In October 2025, Minio stopped distributing pre-built binaries and Docker images, leaving only the source code. “Use go install Making it myself” – was his answer.

For most users, the value of open-source software is not just a copy of the source – What matters is the stability of the supply chain.
You need a stable artifact that you can put into a Dockerfile, an Ansible playbook, or a CI/CD pipeline – no need to install the Go compiler before every deployment.

We reconstructed the distribution:

docker images

pgsty/minio Live on Docker Hub. docker pull pgsty/minio And you are good.

rpm/deb package

Built for major Linux distributions, matching the native package specifications.

CI/CD Pipeline

Fully automated build workflow on GitHub, ensuring ongoing supply chain stability.

If you are using Docker, just swap minio/minio For pgsty/minio.

For native Linux installation, grab the RPM/DEB package from the GitHub releases page. You can also use Pig (PG extension package manager) for easy installation, or configure pigsty-infra apt/dnf repo:

curl https://repo.pigsty.io/pig | bash; 
pig repo add infra -u; pig install minio

Just works as usual.

3. Restore Community Edition Document#

Minio’s official documentation was also at risk – links began to redirect to their commercial product, AIStore.

we bit minio/docsFixed broken links, restored the deleted console doc, and posted it here.

The documents use the same Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license as the originals, with all content preserved and continually maintained.

Our Commitments and Principles#

It’s worth laying out a few things to set expectations.

No new features – just supply chain continuity#

MiniIO is already feature-rich as an S3-compliant object store. Its ready software. It doesn’t need more bells and whistles – it needs a stable, reliable, constantly available build.

What we are doing: Ensuring that you can always get a working, complete MinIO binary that includes the admin console and CVE fixes. RPM, DEB, Docker images – built automatically via CI/CD, drop-in compatible with your existing infra. no need to worry now docker pull return nothing or yum install Failed to find package.

This is a creation for production, not collection#

You might be thinking: “This is just another backup fork, right?” No. MiniIO is a production component in PigstyAnd many users run it as their PostgreSQL backup repository. We run our own builds – if something breaks, we find out and fix it first. We’ve been dogfooding these builds in production for the last three months. Eating your dog’s food yourself is the best QA.

We fix bugs and track CVEs#

If you encounter any issues, feel free to report them on pgsty/minio – but please do not take this as a commercial SLA. We try our best to work as an open-source community project.

Given that AI coding tools have made bug fixing dramatically cheaper, and we’re obviously not adding any new features, I believe the maintenance workload is manageable.

Trademark is hard, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it#

Trademark Notice: MiniIO® is a trademark of MiniIO, Inc. is a registered trademark of. This project (pgsty/minio) is a freely maintained community fork under the AGPL license. Its Minio, Inc. Has no affiliation, endorsement or relationship with. The use of “Minio” in this post refers only to the open-source software project and has no commercial connection.

AGPLv3 gives us explicit rights to fork and distribute, but trademark law is a different domain. We have clearly marked it everywhere as an independent community-protected creation.

If Minio Inc. raises trademark concerns, we will cooperate and change the name (likely something like this). silo Or stow). Until then, we think descriptive use of the original name in the AGPL fork is appropriate – and renaming all minio Does not provide service to reference users.

AI changed the game#

You may ask: can one person really sustain this?

This is 2026. Now things are different. AI coding tools are changing the economics of open-source maintenance.

With tools like Cloud Code, the cost of detecting and fixing bugs in a complex Go project has been reduced by more than an order of magnitude. Maintaining a complex infrastructure project that used to require a dedicated team can now be handled by an experienced engineer with an AI co-pilot.

Consider: Elon shrunk X/Twitter’s engineering team to ~30 people and the system still runs. The Minio fork is much less difficult to maintain without new features – you mainly need the ability to test and verify.

Just Fork It#

Minio Inc. can store a GitHub repo, but they can’t store the demands behind 60k stars, or the dependency graph behind a billion Docker pulls. That demand doesn’t go away – it just finds its way.

HashiCorp’s Terraform joined OpenTofu, and it’s going well. Minio’s situation is actually more favorable – AGPL is more permissive for forks than BSL, with no legal gray areas for community forks. A company can abandon a project, but open-source licenses are specifically designed so that the code cannot be scrapped.

git clone The most powerful mantra in open source. When a company decides to close the doors, the community only needs two words:

Fork it.

Reference#