[BadBadJellyBean]

I am wondering if Minio Inc has rewritten the software in a clean room. Otherwise wouldn't they need to publish the source anyways? Since it is AGPL anyone might potentially be interacting with the software. Do they do that?

[Macha]

The copyright for Minio consists of:

- Code written by the Minio team, which they have full ownership of and can relicense as they wish

- Code written by third party contributors, where Minio required the contributors to provide Minio a BSD license to use the contributions but only published it to other people under AGPL.

So the AGPL doesn't bind Minio themselves because of their licensing policy. (Which is why while pure AGPL might be the open source maximalist license, AGPL + CLA is almost at the opposite end of the scale)

[rzerowan]

Question , can MinIO the company assert AGPL copyright against the fork - i see in the writeup they mentioned trademarks as far as the fork is concerned.

Whats the situation for a AGPL fork , were one to use it can the company assert rights like they did to Nutanix.

[patmorgan23]

Doesn't that depend on the CLA?

Could you not have a CLA that only allows the project to use a specific license?

[throawayonthe]

the FSF position is that GPL is unenforceable without a single copyright owner, which is why almost all gnu projects, linux, canonical/redhat/etc projects have a CLA or something functionally similar

[phoronixrly]

Was going to mention the CLA. Each time you sign a CLA you're doing free work. Never do that. Keep and maintain your patches locally instead.

[tfolbrecht]

Only if they'd taken contributions without authors signing over their rights.

[polskibus]

Surely MinIO dual-licenses its software so paying customers get commercial license?