MinIO Ends Community Development, Positions AIStor as the Future

MinIO has marked its open-source GitHub repository as "THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED," effectively ending active community development. The company is shifting focus to AIStor, its subscription-based enterprise object storage platform. The code remains available under AGPLv3, but future innovation and support are centered on the commercial product.

The open-source repository for MinIO was marked "THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED" on February 12, 2026, in a commit indicating that the project will no longer receive active development or feature updates. The change, pushed to the project's public GitHub source, updates the README and marks the repository as no longer maintained.

MinIO has built a strong legacy over more than a decade, once known as one of the most popular self-hosted, S3-compatible object storage servers. Originally launched in 2014, the software grew quickly among developers and operators for its simplicity, performance, and compatibility with cloud-native infrastructure. Early versions were licensed under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, which helped drive widespread adoption in Kubernetes environments and on bare-metal infrastructure alike.

The project's trajectory shifted in recent years. In 2021, MinIO moved from Apache 2.0 to the more restrictive GNU AGPLv3 license - a decision intended to prevent cloud vendors from repackaging the software without contributing back. By 2025, the distribution model for official binaries and Docker images had changed, and public development activity slowed significantly. The bundled web management console was also removed from community releases.

The February 2026 update formalizes a transition that had already been underway. In recent months, the company has concentrated its engineering and product efforts on AIStor, its subscription-based enterprise object storage platform. With the introduction of new AIStor subscription tiers and expanded commercial positioning, MinIO is aligning its strategy around a supported, revenue-driven platform rather than continuing development of the community edition.

The announcement presents AIStor as a next-generation, enterprise-focused data platform built for scalable, high-performance workloads, while the community edition is no longer under active development.

While the original open-source repository remains visible and available under the AGPLv3 license, it is not expected to receive new features or community-reviewed enhancements. Developers and operators who depended on the community edition now face a fork point: continue with a self-maintained fork, adopt enterprise support, or explore alternative object storage projects.

For organizations that adopted MinIO as an open-source cornerstone, this marks an inflection point. The software itself is not deleted or removed - it can still be cloned, built, and forked. What is ending is the upstream momentum and ecosystem collaboration that once made MinIO one of the most active open-source storage projects. Will the project's legacy endure through community forks, or will it fade as users migrate to other solutions and potential forks? We'll certainly be watching how the community responds in the coming months if not weeks.

• https://github.com/minio/minio/commit/7aac2a2c5b7c...