OpenMaxIO: Forked UI for MinIO Object Storage
39 comments
·October 23, 2025mbreese
I'm not entirely sure how their commercial offering works. It looks like it's a commercial fork of MinIO, but I wasn't able to find anything about assigning copyright for pull requests in their Github. (I didn't look that hard).
But, if the main product is 100% F/OSS AGPL, how are they accepting code from outside contributors and still maintaining a private enterprise offering under (presumably) a different license?
pxc
This hitting the front page made me do a web search review what's going on with MinIO, and... turns out it's still 100% F/OSS, released under the AGPLv3.
This is absolutely not comparable to something like OpenTofu, OpenBao, Forgejo, etc. (I guess it's more like recent CentOS forks, like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, or whatever.)
Personally, I think supporting it would be regrettable. MinIO is fine.
mastax
MinIO has gotten rid of the admin UI from the OSS version and is erasing documentation. Even if they stop here that's enough to need a community fork, but I don't expect them to stop here. Their obvious intent is for the OSS version to only be useful as a trial version of the commercial paid product.
avoutic
MinIO gutted the UI recently. Actually fully removed it from the codebase.
So you either have to stick to a vulnerable version or have no een UI.
This form seems to target just that. So for the UI kinda similar actually.
max-privatevoid
MinIO has a CLA, so they're in the exact same situation as HashiCorp, just not as far ahead.
dang
Recent and related:
MinIO stops distributing free Docker images - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665452 - Oct 2025 (499 comments)
binarymax
Hey I know picking names is hard, but this is the first time I've ever been on the other end of a collision like this.
PedroBatista
What's up with the naming of rage forked projects?
OpenMaxIO, Forgejo, Valkey, OpenTofu..
Some worse than the others, but still..
Btw, MinIO making these not "open open-source" moves should not be a surprise. Since the beginning, YEARS ago their own CEO, lead people talked in a way it was clear they wanted to follow the Hashicorp book, a few years later they've taken quite a few hundreds of millions in investment.
So let's not be childish, adopt it for what it is and when it happens adapt it for what it is.
mholt
Wait'll you hear about:
- https://github.com/WedgeServer/wedge
- https://github.com/tmpim/casket
Both forks of Caddy...
nunez
OpenTofu is a "best of a bad situation" kind of thing. The project was originally called OpenTF, which makes sense since Terraform config code almost always ends in `.tf`, but HashiCorp sent out the lawyers, so they had to change names. Plus, it goes well with OpenBao, their Vault fork.
snug
I don't get your point about naming. What would you have them named? OpenMaxIO seems different than any of the other ones you listed. They wouldn't have been able to name it OpenMinIO without some legal problems.
null
dang
[stub for offtopicness]
(submitted title was "OpenMaxIO is a community-maintained fork of MinIO"; we've replaced it with what the article says, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
0xC0ncord
"Community-maintained" is quite a stretch considering the repository has had no activity since the fork and name change.
sprior
Looks like it's a clone of the browser UI, not the MinIO server (like I was expecting any minute now based on their recent news).
parliament32
> forked from minio/object-browser
> This is a fork of MinIO Console.
> JavaScript 75.2%
It seems this is just a community-maintained fork of the minio UI, not minio itself.
bananadonkey
Isn't this just the UI and not the minio storage server itself?
Title is misleading if so
sreekanth850
This is not minio. Its minio UI.
ekjhgkejhgk
Why "open". The point here is freedom. You're going to give RMS an ulcer poor fellow.
bdcravens
I'll take it over "libre"
ekjhgkejhgk
Yeah I hate libre too, but wouldn't FreeMaxIO be better?
koolba
How about Hosted Better Max IO? Can be called HBO Max for short.
bdcravens
How about More Gain FreeMin
stronglikedan
I feel sorry for the OMIO maintainer community considering how entitled the MinIO community revealed themselves to be.
Spivak
Step 1: I made this thing and am freely giving it away for the benefit of everyone. Come join the party!
Step 2: Wow, because this is a community project I can depend on it continuing to exist freely thanks to a large base of diverse parties invested in its continued growth and availability.
Step 3: Just kidding, I'm taking back the thing I made. Sorry if you were depending on it, migrate to something else or pay me.
Step 4: WTF dude?!
Step 5: Why are you all so entitled?
ianbutler
What is so hard about the idea that you are not perpetually entitled to the free labor of other people?
The only thing they owed people here was a 60 day notice imo. That would better respect the social contract.
ekjhgkejhgk
I agree with you. But people are allowed to complain, so they're complaining. And the maintainers are allowed to ignore the complaining. Everything is according to the process.
evilduck
There was a 60 days notice? https://blog.min.io/
The only notice I have received is from the blowback of their behavior. Walking away from supporting the open source product at any other time than in the wake of a security vulnerability disclosure would have been received better. Sure they're not legally culpable for fixing anything but they're now obviously untrustworthy as a business partner going forwards.
Spivak
I'm not. If they had simply said, "Hey this is getting to be too much work and I don't want to continue anymore. Let me know if you're interested in taking over maintainership of the project." then that's fine. Hell even if they just archived the project and ghosted never to be seen again that's also fine.
It's (yet another) example of a company donning the trappings of an open source project as a "growth hack" or to secure VC funding and then rug pulling when they decide they want to try and squeeze their user base for cash. They're the corporate stooges that insert themselves into high-trust communities and subcultures to make a buck and ruin it for everyone.
michaelgiba
They stopped publishing images, not like they changed anything significant about the product itself.
Frankly the whole thing is not newsworthy
JokerDan
> not like they changed anything significant about the product itself
They had already done this months ago, they changed the licence and stripped a lot of the code of their admin UI/object browser. So a lot of the features vanished for people overnight if they updated. This is what the OP is linked to - a fork at the point that they did this. This was work already done, feature already widely in use, they decided to take it out of what was available to the community.
So the product has significantly changed and offering had been reduced. That in addition to the stopping of publishing images - both without notice - caused a decent bit off community 'wtf'.
This was in response to MinIO/AIStor removing the browser-console UI from the community offering (locking it behind enterprise licensing) a few months back.
Unfortunately, this fork has not developed any traction. It's last commit was 4 months ago basically after the initial fork and instantly became dormant.
You can see the list of 'Still alive?' issues: https://github.com/OpenMaxIO/openmaxio-object-browser/issues...