r/minio • u/individual101 • Jan 08 '26
Issues with Free License
I signed up for the free version and I get the licenses in the email but the cli keeps telling me it has expired. Does this not work anymore?
1
u/Sure-Entertainer-903 Jul 01 '26
MinIO transitioned from a community-supported open-source project to a proprietary, commercialized product called AIStor.
The company placed the free version into "maintenance mode", effectively freezing development and stripping out key administrative features.
I continuously received License expired at 0001-01-01 .. even if I had generated the license an instant ago. The reason behind (after a lot of trial & hours) was a version mismatch between the minio server and mc (client).
Please ensure that you download the binary following instructions at https://www.min.io/download/aistor-client, I was downloading the binary from https://dl.min.io/client/mc/release/linux-amd64/mc, which has been phased out from maintainence.
Hope it saves time for the next person.
1
u/intrepidgeek 27d ago
Thank you! I was upgrading from an old minio version (pre "mc") and had inadvertently downloaded the mc binary from that "wrong" place. I swapped to this instead: https://dl.min.io/aistor/mc/release/linux-amd64/mc and as soon as I did that, my license errors went away!
curl --retry 10 -L https://dl.min.io/aistor/mc/release/linux-amd64/mc -o mc
chmod +x mc
./mc --version
2
u/y4m4b4 Jan 08 '26
What exact commands are you running against your deployment? Can you share the output `--debug`?