MinIO

MinIO is a company that makes scalable storage software. It is run by husband-and-wife team AB Periasamy and Garima Kapoor.

They’re a bit of an insane company who does stuff like attack its competitors based on licensing terms out in public when their arguments cannot hold up in court. Two examples:

• Nutanix Objects Violates MinIO’s Open Source License (2022)
• Weka Violates MinIO’s Open Source Licenses (2023)

In both, MinIO claims they are “revoking” licenses from Nutanix and WEKA. The problem is that there’s no way to “revoke” Apache v2 licenses,¹ which is why MinIO had to litigate this in the court of public opinion rather than, you know, a real courtroom with real lawyers. When this became apparent to the public, MinIO published a follow-up walking back the legal scare tactics and told WEKA customers that they were fine to use WEKA even though it redistributed MinIO software.²

For reference, WEKA responded with Data storage leader WEKA: MinIO claims baseless.

Footnotes

1. Apache 2.0 licenses are literally “irrevocable.” ↩

2. Our Response to Weka’s Post and Clarifying Terminology ↩