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AGPL is a plague. So many possible partners or future stewards won’t touch anything minIO with a ten foot pole unfortunately.

And I say this because minIO started to actively engage on the ugly parts of the license

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AGPL is "a plague" by design (viral). It has the explicit goal that any improvements flow back to the community project and the virality is a necessary building block for this. It is an elegant solution to a tragedy of the commons problem.

Companies like MinIO extending the virality beyond the single software/work, even though not intended by license, gives it a bad reputation. They have fixed https://min.io/compliance now, but I guess it does not matter anymore.

Intentions of the license aside, the abusive stance of how far the license extends is an unsettled matter in the US court system. And that means when a project wants to assert that any software which talks to a minIO instance over s3 is included in this license expectation, it’s on you to decide if you want to go the distance defending yourself. And even then, they can just drop the suit whenever in that long process and continue the status quo world of ambiguity.

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