MinIO went dark on 13 February. Docker will keep patching it until 2031, for a fee.

An end-of-life finding is a documentary problem before it is a technical one. The auditor is not reading the code, only whether somebody is contractually on the hook for patching it, and that is exactly the surface Docker is selling against: the maintained MinIO image carries SBOMs, VEX statements and SLSA Build Level 3 provenance kept current for the life of the image ^[12], with critical and high-severity CVEs patched on a 14-day service level ^[8]. The code does not get younger. The signature on it changes hands.

Do the arithmetic on the offer and you get a date. Five years past 13 February 2026 puts the outer edge of MinIO coverage in February 2031 ^[18], and that is the number to put in the roadmap, because Docker's own description of the product is that patches and audit evidence keep flowing on the images already in production while the migration happens on the roadmap's schedule ^[19]. The migration is not cancelled. It is refinanced.

The entitlement mechanics deserve more attention than the SLA. Applied to a repository, it covers every available ELS version there, and when one migration completes you re-point it at the next repository so the coverage follows the risk ^[10]. That is serial coverage for a problem that arrives in parallel: a shop carrying MinIO alongside Node 18, Python 3.8 and an older Airflow is not solving four findings with one entitlement ^[5][20]. Docker also does not state a price in the announcement ^[17], which makes the build-versus-buy comparison hard to run against the alternative it describes, namely staffing sustained Go security engineering for a project that no longer ships fixes ^[14].

Docker frames three options for MinIO operators, adds that doing nothing is not a fourth ^[14], and happens to be the vendor for one of the three. The framing is self-serving and still roughly correct about the storage layer, where a move to another object store is measured in petabytes and the CVE exposure grows for the whole length of the project ^[15]. Docker says it tracks new CVEs across MinIO and its full Go dependency graph, backports, rebuilds and ships ^[16], which is the part a platform team would otherwise own outright.

The scale claim is worth separating from the sales claim. Docker cites Black Duck's 2026 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis report for the finding that 93% of commercial codebases contain components with no development activity in at least two years ^[4]. Most of that dormancy never becomes a finding, because dormancy on its own is not a status any framework flags. What the 13 February archive did was convert a condition into a date ^[1], and frameworks including FedRAMP, DORA and the Cyber Resilience Act read unpatched end-of-life software in production as a finding ^[6].

Which leaves the question the attestations do not settle. By 2031, a maintained MinIO will be a vendor artifact with five years of backported fixes and no upstream to reconcile against, adopted through a FROM-line change in the same registry teams already use ^[11]. That is support in the audit sense. It is also a fork with a support contract stapled to it, and the SBOM will not tell you which one you bought.