With 16 x 8TB drives, we are talking about 64TB usable space after erasure coding. Minio is designed to serve the needs of a single tenant - 64TB is usually much bigger than a single tenant's needs. However you often see 100s of thousands of such tenants in a cloud like environment.
Making a single large PB sized volume where the disks and nodes are managed like a blackbox by the filesystem is quite scary to us at Minio. Any crash means we blew up all the tenants at once. 1000s of individual Minio tenants means, we know when we add the million'th minio instance, it is not any more complex than the first instance of Minio.
Provisioning with k8s [1], mesos [2] or other external orchestration tools is better than Minio's own resource management system. When it comes to the applications, objects are just represented as URLs. Some data sitting on Amazon S3 and some on Minio makes no difference to the application.
We are also planning to introduce a namespace layer to work on top to combine these individual tenants into single namespace. This would allow you to transparently add new clusters as you scale without loosing the ability to have a single namespace.
We hang out at slack [3], please reach out if you have further questions.
GNU AGPL is an ideal license for free software projects. We are a strong supporter of the GNU project. We chose Apache License for Minio purely for adoption reasons. Most of our users build proprietary software around Minio and their legal council has a default NO policy towards GNU licenses. Besides, FSF has also approved Apache License v2 as a free software license.
Proprietary forks are OK with us. It will be too expensive to maintain branches of their own and catch up with the upstream.
Making money off from another product calling it your own innovation is plagiarism.
https://www.weka.io/blog/cloud-storage/amazon-s3-protocol/
There is never a mention of that it uses MinIO underneath.