Maintainer of Milvus here. A few thoughts from someone who lives this every day:

  1. The free user problem is real, and AI makes it worse. We serve a massive community of free Milvus users — and we're grateful for them, they make the project what it is. But we also feel the tension MinIO is describing. You invest serious engineering effort into stability and bug fixes, and most users will never become paying customers. In the AI era this ratio only gets harder — copy with AI becomes easier than ever

  2. We need better object storage options. As a heavy consumer of object storage, Milvus needs a reliable, performant, and truly open foundation. RustFS is a solid candidate — we've been evaluating it seriously. But we'd love to see more good options emerge. If the ecosystem can't meet our needs long-term, we may have to invest in building our own.

  3. Open source licensing deserves a serious conversation. The Apache 2.0 / Hadoop-era model served us well, but cracks are showing. Cloud vendors and AI companies consume enormous amounts of open-source infrastructure, and the incentives to contribute back are weaker than ever. I don't think the answer is closing the source — but I also don't think "hope enterprises pay for support" scales forever. We need the community to have an honest conversation about what sustainable open source looks like in the AI era. MinIO's move is a symptom worth paying attention to.