Without a valid CLA and a strong core team, you often end up with fragmentation or legal deadlock. Even the ASF isn't a silver bullet—projects without strong leadership die there all the time.
The CLA exists to prevent that friction.
The Good: Single-node is stable, and the team moves fast—most of my reported bugs get patched within a couple of weeks. The Bad: Distributed mode needs work. Bucket replication and lifecycle policies are still WIP (as noted in their roadmap) and not usable yet.
It's promising, but definitely check the roadmap before deploying at scale.
Big thanks to MinIO, RustFS, and Garage for their contributions. That said, MinIO closing the door on open source so abruptly definitely spooked the community. But honestly, fair play to them—open source projects eventually need a path to monetization.
I’ve evaluated both RustFS and Garage, and here’s the breakdown:
Release Cadence: Garage feels a bit slower, while RustFS is shipping updates almost weekly.
Licensing: Garage is on AGPLv3, but RustFS uses the Apache license (which is huge for enterprise adoption).
Stability: Garage currently has the edge in distributed environments.
With MinIO effectively bowing out of the OSS race, my money is on RustFS to take the lead.
> open source projects eventually need a path to monetization
I guess I'm curious if I'm understanding what you mean here, because it seems like there's a huge number of counterexamples. GNU coreutils. The linux kernel. FreeBSD. NFS and iSCSI drivers for either of those kernels. Cgroups in the Linux kernel.
If anything, it seems strange to expect to be able to monetize free-as-in-freedom software. GNU freedom number 0 is "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose". I don't see anything in there about "except for business purposes", or anything in there about "except for businesses I think can afford to pay me". It seems like a lot of these "open core" cloud companies just have a fundamental misunderstanding about what free software is.
Which isn't to say I have anything against people choosing to monetize their software. I couldn't afford to give all my work away for free, which is why I don't do that. However, I don't feel a lot of sympathy to people who surely use tons of actual libre software without paying for it, when someone uses their libre software without paying.
I think, if anything, in this age of AI coding we should see a resurgence in true open-source projects where people are writing code how they feel like writing it and tossing it out into the world. The quality will be a mixed bag! and that's okay. No warranty expressed or implied. As the quality rises and the cost of AI coding drops - and it will, this phase of $500/mo for Cursor is not going to last - I think we'll see plenty more open source projects that embody the spirit you're talking about.
The trick here is that people may not want to be coding MinIO. It's like... just not that fun of a thing to work on, compared to something more visible, more elevator-pitchy, more sexy. You spend all your spare time donating your labour to a project that... serves files? I the lowly devops bow before you and thank you for your beautiful contribution, but I the person meeting you at a party wonder why you do this in particular with your spare time instead of, well, so many other things.
I've never understood it, but then, that's why I'm not a famous open-source dev, right?
Yeah, that's why I said maybe I'm misunderstanding OP. If that's what OP meant by "monetization" then sure, monetization is great.
Companies pay their employees to work on Linux because it's valuable to them. Intel wants their hardware well supported. Facebook wants their servers running fast. It's an ecosystem built around free-as-in-freedom software, where a lot of people get paid to make the software better, and everyone can use it for free-as-in-beer
Compare that to the "open core" model where a company generally offers a limited gratis version of their product, but is really organized to funnel leads into their paid offering.
The latter is fine, but I don't really consider it some kind of charity or public service. It's just a company that's decided on a very radical marketing strategy.
You would be incorrect, LWN tracks statistics about contributor employers for every Linux kernel release and their latest post about that says that "(None)" (ie unpaid contributions) beat a number of large companies, including RedHat by the lines changed metric, or SUSE by the changesets metric.
Definitely individual can start with their own reason. It is questionable whether they can make contributions which scope would be a quarter of the work including design or even larger.
Other than a few popular libraries, I'm unaware of any major open source project that isn't primarily supported by corporate employees working on it as part of their day job.
Shipping updates almost weekly is the opposite of what I want for a complex, mission-critical distributed system. Building a production-ready S3 replacement requires careful, deliberate and rigorous engineering work (which is what Garage is doing[1]).
It's not clear if RustFS is even implementing a proper distributed consensus mechanism. Erasure Coding with quorum replication alone is not enough for partition tolerance. I can't find anything in their docs.
Human beings have this strange desire to be fed, have shelter and other such mundane stuff, all of those clearly less important than software in the big scheme of things, of course.
Many open source are not core business but supporting layers of overall organisations getting free PRs. Others are pet projects that tried to do too many things and overextended themselves for little additional value failing any sort of sustainability logic. Others had a larger range of features required than the original dev was aware of.
The beauty of open source is that there are all kinds of reasons for contributing to it, and all are valid. For some, it's just a hobby. For others, like Valve, it's a means of building their own platform. Hardware manufacturers like AMD (and increasingly Nvidia) contribute drivers to the kernel because they want to sell hardware.
God forbid a passion project stay just a passion project. You don't see this monetization perspective in the hobbyist 3D printing community or airbrushing communities. This is directly a result of how much OSS is framed as a "time sink" instead of enjoyable hobby. I don't like this narrative, and don't think its healthy.
Thanks. I hadn't heard of RustFS.
I've been meaning to migrate off my MinIO deployment.
I recently learned that Ceph also has an object store and have been playing around with microceph. Ceph also is more flexible than garage in terms of aggregating differently sized disks. Since it's also already integrated in Proxmox and has over a decade of enterprise deployments, that's my top contender at the moment. I'm just not sure about the level of S3 API compatibility.
Ceph is quite expensive in terms of resource usage, but it is robust and battle-tested. RustFS is very new, very much a work in progress[1], and will probably eat your data.
If you're looking for something that won't eat your data in edge cases, Ceph (and perhaps Garage) are your only options.
> open source projects eventually need a path to monetization.
I don't think open source projects need a path to monetization in all cases, most don't have that. But if you make such a project your main income, you certainly need money.
If you then restrict the license, you are just developing commercial software, it then has little to do with open source. Developing commercial software is completely fine, but it simply isn't open source.
There is also real open source software with a steady income and they are different than projects that change to commercial software and we should discriminate terms here.
Last time I checked (~half a year ago) Garage didn't have a bunch of s3 features like object versioning and locking. Does RustFS have a list of s3 features they support?
Good question. On their website they list 3550 Lenox Road, NE Atlanta, Georgia 30326 as their address. But no info about the company name, CEO or anything like that.
Speaking as an open-source enthusiast, I’m actually really digging RustFS. Honestly, anything that can replace or compete with MinIO is a win for the users. Their marketing vibe feels pretty American, actually—they aren't afraid to be loud and proud, haha. You gotta give it to them though, they’ve got guts, and their timing is spot on.
