MinIO, the widely used high-performance, S3-compatible object storage system for cloud-native applications with millions of deployments worldwide, is about to reach the end of its life cycle. But the way this shift has unfolded has left many in the open-source community raising their eyebrows. Here’s the background.

At the start of the summer, MinIO suddenly stripped nearly all useful features from its admin console, leaving them available only through the command line. As expected, the change triggered a wave of frustrated user reactions. What no one realized then, however, was that the move would later prove to be a deliberate and carefully planned step in light of what followed.