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Didn't contribute to MinIO, but if they accepted external contributions without making them sign a CLA, they cannot change the license without asking every external contributor for consent to the license change. As it is AGPL, they still have to provide the source code somewhere.

IANAL, of course

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They required a "Community Contribution License" in each PR description, which licensed each contribution under Apache 2 as an inbound license.

Meanwhile, MinIO's own contributions and the distribution itself (outbound license) were AGPL licensed.

It's effectively a CLA, just a bit weaker, since they're still bound by the terms of Apache 2 vs. a full license assignment like most CLAs.

People underestimate the amount of fakeness a lot of these "open-core/source" orgs have. I guarantee from day one of starting the MinIO project, they had eyes on future commercialization, and of course made contributors sign away their rights knowing full well they are going to go closed source.

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