[ddevault]

Minio's development culture has a very self-interested feel to it, like it's their thing moreso than the community's thing. Combine that with the corporate pandering it's designed for, and this was a long time coming. Back in February I remarked on IRC "I feel like minio is always one bad day away from changing to some bullshit proprietary license." I'm glad that it's the AGPL and not one of the nonfree fad licenses going around.

For those wondering if they can relicense other people's changes without a CLA, the answer is yes. Apache 2.0 is compatible with the AGPL, so it can be relicensed with it (though the original contributions remain available as Apache 2.0). This does not work backwards, however - this is a one-way change. All of MinIO's code is today and forevermore available under the terms of the AGPL.

They've done a pretty shitty job of it, though. No one should have a license change sprung on them like this. Further indicates that Minio does not value their community's input.

[the_duke]

Is sublicensing and relicensing the same thing? Sublicensing to AGPL should definitely be OK, but does that mean they can just relicense all contributed code and remove all mentions of Apache2? Seems doubtful to me.

This GNU article [1] explicitly mentions that subsumed licenses still need to be mentioned in the source.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-compatibility.en.html

[ddevault]

Hm, I'm not a lawyer, but the answer is... kind of. It's a bit complicated. I can understand a valid interpretation for either answer.