This is disappointing, time to migrate from yet another was-open-source-now-only-technically-open-source software.
At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled. Essentially treat open source as closed source.
Oftentimes the alternative is migrating to one dying or unstable zero-funding open source project to the next.
Which path you go down depends on a lot of factors of that particular piece of software.
Can I trust FreeCORE to be a stable, secure project that hangs on to my NAS data if it’s an unfunded fork? Or would it be better to give up some openness for something like TrueNAS SCALE?
When it comes to stuff like Proxmox and TrueNAS I think a lot of what keeps those good products for homelab use is the fact that they have commercial customers paying for the development. I can count on TrueNAS being around and getting updates because they have a proven revenue stream.
That said, it’s a balance, because sometimes that commercialization becomes a rug pull. A lot of the viability of those projects for homelab use revolves around the companies that put those products out recognizing that they have a customer base that will not pay and accepting that fact without deciding to try to squeeze out every last person who just might pay by compromising the free edition.
I like the way Proxmox and OpnSense handle this: you get the community patch channels which are “not for production use” which scares the corporate businesses into paying but has zero negative impact for home users.
To be clear I’m also not saying FreeCORE specifically is a fly-by-night project or unstable or anything. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with it. I’m just saying, sometimes projects like that end up not being the right choice for certain use cases.
Regardless the estimated quality of the new thing, there is a point and a value in penalizing the old thing when it fails to adhere to principles.
One must have principles onesself to see this as imortant though.
A lot of people use words like "practical" or "pragmatic" to avoid inconvenience.
I've already been using zVault for a year which is a fork of the last truenas core, but it never got any further updates and it's about to become impossible to run up to date software in jails on the old host. The pkg repos that support the host version are about to go eol and the binaries will be gone. So I've already gone through the "what if this doesn't go anywhere?"
My point: It's a pain but I won't relieve that pain by running trunas scale.
I'd rather try switching to xigmanas or dump the whole concept of the front end and just run plain freebsd and learn a few commands to manage storage and file services directly and a maybe a seperate dedicated jail manager like bastille. At least that way I can never be stuck in this position again where I can't update my own software because someone else stopped updating their software.
But, at this point, AI makes code cheap enough that I would just fork the open source software and maintain it, instead of paying for a third party. Heck, even with saas, I may clone internally.
Knowing a little about the maintainers and their model, this isn’t a private-equity cash grab or Mr Monopoly twirling his moustache; it’s a business trying to stay sustainable in open source. There are no billionaires here: they staff developers who contribute to projects like OpenZFS, and developers who build enterprise features that fund all of it. Their business is being challenged by “global” shops taking advantage of the platforms openness - and this isn’t the virtuous or even legally tenable type of competition. It’s “violating terms and not legally accessible” competition, and they are taking measures. It sucks for everyone.
If TrueNAS/iX whatever turns around and sells to Bending Spoons, then I’ll of course owe you a beer. Until then, their leadership is just trying keep the project alive - and funding other open source efforts at the same time.
Why is it not enough to give you all of their code for free? Why do they also have obligations and expectations beyond that? The entitlement never ends!
> At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled.
"Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.
They're allowed to stop publishing new work whenever they want to. That's part of the free, open-source software game, wherein: We're all free to provide as much as we wish, and also free to consume as much as we want. Nobody necessarily owes anyone else anything and it's really very beautiful in these ways. This is enabled in large part due to the very low cost of distributing copies of intangible software (which can be very close to zero).
But when money gets involved, then things become different. Contracts can be had. Support requirements can be determined. If a contract requires 5 years of support, then it can be reasonably expected for support to continue for at least 5 years.
It's OK to want that, and to never use software that doesn't involve money. It's also OK for an author/company/org to not want that, and to never agree to those terms.
These are different goals, but one party doing it one way doesn't detract from another party doing it some other way. It's all OK.
> "Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.
I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue.
It is now a common business strategy to commercialise an open source project. FreeNAS was commercialised as TrueNAS, which is now having some of the source pulled.
TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects.
> I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue.
Your statements clearly took issue with the fact that your company has to pay open-source devs whose work it uses for reliability. You presented the options as "pay them, or else get rugpulled", and then went on to say "how did we end up in this state of affairs [where we must pay to not get rugpulled]". There is no possible way to interpret your comment other than lamenting the "state of affairs".
> TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects.
As long as it isn't violating the license of those projects, they still don't owe anyone anything. If it is violating the license, complain about it on those terms. But your complaint was about open-source in general, not specifically only this project.
They do not give all of the code. If you have an object, and don't have everything needed to reproduce the object, then you have not been given the source to the object.
And with BSD licenced code this is their right.
And it's my and anyone else's right to observe all of this and criticize it.
Likewise, it is my right to criticise you for exercising your right to criticise them. Nobody said you aren't allowed to, but just as anyone is allowed to whine about not being given enough free stuff, I'm allowed to call out that they're acting like an entitled child in public. Just because you can legally do something doesn't mean that it is socially acceptable to do so.
You didn't deserve to be downvoted to hell and back. People deserve to be paid for their work, and without copyright law only mega-cap companies would ever be able to capture enough value from their work to survive.
People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years.
Calling it a "rug pull" when the creator of an open source project decides to stop giving away future work for free is a delusional level of self-entitlement.
(1) The previous releases are still open source. If you don't like it, fork the last free release and maintain it yourself.
(2) People deserve whatever the market is willing to pay for their work. See above.
Frankly, if D. Richard Hipp decided to stop giving away future versions of SQLite for free, I would be the first person to congratulate him for finally having the courage to put his foot down and say "my fellow committers and I deserve at least a few million dollars for 20 years of work making something that billions of machines rely upon."
In ~2017 I ditched FreeNAS when my FreeNAS Mini died from the Atom C2000 hardware failure. iXSystems was great about getting me a replacement board, but I decided when I rebuilt the system to just use FreeBSD and get used to command-line only administration. That directly lead to me learning pf, jails, bhyve, etc. Yeah, I don't have any fancy web UI, but I've had a rock solid system for almost 10 years with Samba + NFS running without issue.
I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution.
When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM.
I decided to just use an existing Linux box that was already doing storage stuff and add ZFS to it.
It's been fine ever since. Keeping ZFS going isn't deep voodoo at all; of all the things this box does, ZFS has probably been the most hands-off aspect of it.
What a shame I didn't discover this sooner -- I finally sent my 11-year-old TrueNAS system[1] through the one-way Linux door about a year ago because I gave up on any hope that something like this would come along and I didn't see another way to keep it current.
The migration path went smoothly but I preferred the FreeBSD setup if only because it forced me to do something a bit more interesting in my spare time. I do quite a lot of Linux work in my day job and it was nice to occasionally work on something that was surface-level similar but subtly and not-so-subtly different.
[1] Over 11 years I have replaced every component (even the CPU/motherboard) at least once except for the case. Migrating from MBR to UEFI was "fun".
FreeBSD with ZFS tends to be less chaotic once setup. Linux distro in storage appliances can be hit or miss, but ZFS/F2FS/CephFS for /home and ext4+Overlayfs for OS / are reliable these days.
Usually, for JBOD file archiving people want to avoid cutting-edge anything. Sometimes Linux kernel less-popular fs updates add or remove data-corrupting fringe filesystem bugs and features. People usually discover this on their own after the first SSD/HDD starts to wear-out, upgrade breaks compatibility, and the solution is re-install/copy-over everything.
Accordingly, I was surprised people now deploy btrfs on linux / for some distro, as your options when things go awry was limited at one time. Would be cool if it was finally production ready, and actually reliable on degraded hardware.
Too late for me, started my own mini vanity NAS/automated-testing project last year with a few built in features similar to https://guacamole.apache.org and Proxmox. If the OS build stops sucking over winter break, than I may share the build-script someplace for people to pull off parts they find useful, and a USB-bootable portable rtx GPU image for test-drive/recovery scenarios. =3
I used TrueNAS in the past but last touched it several years ago.
I gather now there are two flavors: CORE which continues to use FreeBSD under the hood, and SCALE (aka Community Edition) which is based on Debian Linux. If I understand correctly, the former is only receiving security and stability updates, and iXsystems is developing all new features only on SCALE.
If you were to install fresh today, would you prefer this (FreeCORE), BSDnas, or the official SCALE version - and why?
Why does anyone bother with these ephemeral meme distros when you can accomplish the same with vanilla FreeBSD/Illumos/Linux using standard commands and documentation?
If you need your hand held to file share, that's why Windows Server still exists and is the gold standard for SMB.
I did the migration to Linux and it actually was painless. I didn't really notice any degradation or hiccups in any way. But I guess this is a good option if FreeBSD is important to you.
And for those still confused, CORE is FreeBSD-based and has been discontinued, while SCALE is Debian-based and the version that will be developed by TrueNAS going forwards.
Who is behind this? I've been burned once with nas, and I watched the long Plex to Jellyfin saga. What assurance do I have that this will continue to be developed and will become good?
This seems nice. FreeBSD always seemed nicer than Linux, though now that Linux is being developed by LLMs and Torvalds is vibe-coding, I wonder if they'll be able to keep up.
As far as I understand, Torvalds said that he is not going to oppose all AI-generated improvements to Linux, not that he's vibe coding new kernel modules for fun.
Linux is definitely going to speed up as it starts to get vibe coded. In a few years, I bet that it's all going to be built with agentic loops, and nobody will be looking at the code at all.
What do you call people who vibe code? When he says that he sees a 10x improvement in productivity with AI code gen, what makes you think he's going to put the tool down? Do you think he's stupid or something?
He'll keep ramping up his vibe coding, because he can see it's the future.
Worth noting that TrueNAS recently stopped publishing their build scripts, intentionally making it harder to build their open source code.[0]
[0] https://forums.truenas.com/t/clearing-the-air-on-build-scrip...
Doesn't this violate the whole spirit of the GPL? He's shocked that the usual suspects are ripping off GPL code. Tale as old as time.
It's like those SOHO router vendors that release incomprehensible tarballs of their GPL components; lotsa luck building it.
If I'm paying for closed-source ZFS, I'll go with the real thing and buy a Solaris license.
Not just the spirit. GPL requires build scripts along with the code.
This is disappointing, time to migrate from yet another was-open-source-now-only-technically-open-source software.
At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled. Essentially treat open source as closed source.
How did we end up with this state of affairs?
Oftentimes the alternative is migrating to one dying or unstable zero-funding open source project to the next.
Which path you go down depends on a lot of factors of that particular piece of software.
Can I trust FreeCORE to be a stable, secure project that hangs on to my NAS data if it’s an unfunded fork? Or would it be better to give up some openness for something like TrueNAS SCALE?
When it comes to stuff like Proxmox and TrueNAS I think a lot of what keeps those good products for homelab use is the fact that they have commercial customers paying for the development. I can count on TrueNAS being around and getting updates because they have a proven revenue stream.
That said, it’s a balance, because sometimes that commercialization becomes a rug pull. A lot of the viability of those projects for homelab use revolves around the companies that put those products out recognizing that they have a customer base that will not pay and accepting that fact without deciding to try to squeeze out every last person who just might pay by compromising the free edition.
I like the way Proxmox and OpnSense handle this: you get the community patch channels which are “not for production use” which scares the corporate businesses into paying but has zero negative impact for home users.
To be clear I’m also not saying FreeCORE specifically is a fly-by-night project or unstable or anything. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with it. I’m just saying, sometimes projects like that end up not being the right choice for certain use cases.
Regardless the estimated quality of the new thing, there is a point and a value in penalizing the old thing when it fails to adhere to principles.
One must have principles onesself to see this as imortant though.
A lot of people use words like "practical" or "pragmatic" to avoid inconvenience.
I've already been using zVault for a year which is a fork of the last truenas core, but it never got any further updates and it's about to become impossible to run up to date software in jails on the old host. The pkg repos that support the host version are about to go eol and the binaries will be gone. So I've already gone through the "what if this doesn't go anywhere?"
My point: It's a pain but I won't relieve that pain by running trunas scale.
I'd rather try switching to xigmanas or dump the whole concept of the front end and just run plain freebsd and learn a few commands to manage storage and file services directly and a maybe a seperate dedicated jail manager like bastille. At least that way I can never be stuck in this position again where I can't update my own software because someone else stopped updating their software.
Nobody wants to fund it.
But, at this point, AI makes code cheap enough that I would just fork the open source software and maintain it, instead of paying for a third party. Heck, even with saas, I may clone internally.
Knowing a little about the maintainers and their model, this isn’t a private-equity cash grab or Mr Monopoly twirling his moustache; it’s a business trying to stay sustainable in open source. There are no billionaires here: they staff developers who contribute to projects like OpenZFS, and developers who build enterprise features that fund all of it. Their business is being challenged by “global” shops taking advantage of the platforms openness - and this isn’t the virtuous or even legally tenable type of competition. It’s “violating terms and not legally accessible” competition, and they are taking measures. It sucks for everyone.
If TrueNAS/iX whatever turns around and sells to Bending Spoons, then I’ll of course owe you a beer. Until then, their leadership is just trying keep the project alive - and funding other open source efforts at the same time.
Maybe AI fucks all of this up, who knows ….
Why is it not enough to give you all of their code for free? Why do they also have obligations and expectations beyond that? The entitlement never ends!
> At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled.
"Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.
I'll bite.
They're allowed to stop publishing new work whenever they want to. That's part of the free, open-source software game, wherein: We're all free to provide as much as we wish, and also free to consume as much as we want. Nobody necessarily owes anyone else anything and it's really very beautiful in these ways. This is enabled in large part due to the very low cost of distributing copies of intangible software (which can be very close to zero).
But when money gets involved, then things become different. Contracts can be had. Support requirements can be determined. If a contract requires 5 years of support, then it can be reasonably expected for support to continue for at least 5 years.
It's OK to want that, and to never use software that doesn't involve money. It's also OK for an author/company/org to not want that, and to never agree to those terms.
These are different goals, but one party doing it one way doesn't detract from another party doing it some other way. It's all OK.
> "Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.
I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue.
It is now a common business strategy to commercialise an open source project. FreeNAS was commercialised as TrueNAS, which is now having some of the source pulled.
TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects.
> I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue.
Your statements clearly took issue with the fact that your company has to pay open-source devs whose work it uses for reliability. You presented the options as "pay them, or else get rugpulled", and then went on to say "how did we end up in this state of affairs [where we must pay to not get rugpulled]". There is no possible way to interpret your comment other than lamenting the "state of affairs".
> TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects.
As long as it isn't violating the license of those projects, they still don't owe anyone anything. If it is violating the license, complain about it on those terms. But your complaint was about open-source in general, not specifically only this project.
They do not give all of the code. If you have an object, and don't have everything needed to reproduce the object, then you have not been given the source to the object.
And with BSD licenced code this is their right.
And it's my and anyone else's right to observe all of this and criticize it.
Likewise, it is my right to criticise you for exercising your right to criticise them. Nobody said you aren't allowed to, but just as anyone is allowed to whine about not being given enough free stuff, I'm allowed to call out that they're acting like an entitled child in public. Just because you can legally do something doesn't mean that it is socially acceptable to do so.
You didn't deserve to be downvoted to hell and back. People deserve to be paid for their work, and without copyright law only mega-cap companies would ever be able to capture enough value from their work to survive.
People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years.
Calling it a "rug pull" when the creator of an open source project decides to stop giving away future work for free is a delusional level of self-entitlement.
(1) The previous releases are still open source. If you don't like it, fork the last free release and maintain it yourself.
(2) People deserve whatever the market is willing to pay for their work. See above.
Frankly, if D. Richard Hipp decided to stop giving away future versions of SQLite for free, I would be the first person to congratulate him for finally having the courage to put his foot down and say "my fellow committers and I deserve at least a few million dollars for 20 years of work making something that billions of machines rely upon."
In ~2017 I ditched FreeNAS when my FreeNAS Mini died from the Atom C2000 hardware failure. iXSystems was great about getting me a replacement board, but I decided when I rebuilt the system to just use FreeBSD and get used to command-line only administration. That directly lead to me learning pf, jails, bhyve, etc. Yeah, I don't have any fancy web UI, but I've had a rock solid system for almost 10 years with Samba + NFS running without issue.
I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution.
When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM.
I decided to just use an existing Linux box that was already doing storage stuff and add ZFS to it.
It's been fine ever since. Keeping ZFS going isn't deep voodoo at all; of all the things this box does, ZFS has probably been the most hands-off aspect of it.
What a shame I didn't discover this sooner -- I finally sent my 11-year-old TrueNAS system[1] through the one-way Linux door about a year ago because I gave up on any hope that something like this would come along and I didn't see another way to keep it current.
The migration path went smoothly but I preferred the FreeBSD setup if only because it forced me to do something a bit more interesting in my spare time. I do quite a lot of Linux work in my day job and it was nice to occasionally work on something that was surface-level similar but subtly and not-so-subtly different.
[1] Over 11 years I have replaced every component (even the CPU/motherboard) at least once except for the case. Migrating from MBR to UEFI was "fun".
The NAS of Theseus
FreeBSD with ZFS tends to be less chaotic once setup. Linux distro in storage appliances can be hit or miss, but ZFS/F2FS/CephFS for /home and ext4+Overlayfs for OS / are reliable these days.
Usually, for JBOD file archiving people want to avoid cutting-edge anything. Sometimes Linux kernel less-popular fs updates add or remove data-corrupting fringe filesystem bugs and features. People usually discover this on their own after the first SSD/HDD starts to wear-out, upgrade breaks compatibility, and the solution is re-install/copy-over everything.
Accordingly, I was surprised people now deploy btrfs on linux / for some distro, as your options when things go awry was limited at one time. Would be cool if it was finally production ready, and actually reliable on degraded hardware.
Too late for me, started my own mini vanity NAS/automated-testing project last year with a few built in features similar to https://guacamole.apache.org and Proxmox. If the OS build stops sucking over winter break, than I may share the build-script someplace for people to pull off parts they find useful, and a USB-bootable portable rtx GPU image for test-drive/recovery scenarios. =3
Was super excited until i saw thatcit was the old freebsd base and not the |inux future
There's also bsdnas: https://bsdnas.com
I used TrueNAS in the past but last touched it several years ago.
I gather now there are two flavors: CORE which continues to use FreeBSD under the hood, and SCALE (aka Community Edition) which is based on Debian Linux. If I understand correctly, the former is only receiving security and stability updates, and iXsystems is developing all new features only on SCALE.
If you were to install fresh today, would you prefer this (FreeCORE), BSDnas, or the official SCALE version - and why?
No MacOS clients, so don't need SMB Spotlight.
Why does anyone bother with these ephemeral meme distros when you can accomplish the same with vanilla FreeBSD/Illumos/Linux using standard commands and documentation?
If you need your hand held to file share, that's why Windows Server still exists and is the gold standard for SMB.
I did the migration to Linux and it actually was painless. I didn't really notice any degradation or hiccups in any way. But I guess this is a good option if FreeBSD is important to you.
AT first I was very confused, then I realized that this is building on TrueNAS CORE, and not TrueNAS SCALE. Makes much more sense now!
And for those still confused, CORE is FreeBSD-based and has been discontinued, while SCALE is Debian-based and the version that will be developed by TrueNAS going forwards.
Hence the "continued" part in the title.
Ha interesting, any idea why the FreeBSD variant was discontinued? This was one of the projects I always associated with FreeBSD.
Chasing dockerized enterprise customers.
Who is behind this? I've been burned once with nas, and I watched the long Plex to Jellyfin saga. What assurance do I have that this will continue to be developed and will become good?
Thank you, you made my day 100% better
oh man, just as I upgraded to the debian TrueNAS
Is this just butt hurt BSD users not wanting to use Linux as the base of TrueNAS?
Is truenas scale and proxmox just butt hurt linux users not wanting to use windows server?
This seems nice. FreeBSD always seemed nicer than Linux, though now that Linux is being developed by LLMs and Torvalds is vibe-coding, I wonder if they'll be able to keep up.
As far as I understand, Torvalds said that he is not going to oppose all AI-generated improvements to Linux, not that he's vibe coding new kernel modules for fun.
Torvalds is mostly merging code in the kernel, not writing modules. He claims he's a manager now: https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-summit-linus-torva...
But he's very pro-ai, though, and is vibe closing other projects like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Vide-Coding
Linux is definitely going to speed up as it starts to get vibe coded. In a few years, I bet that it's all going to be built with agentic loops, and nobody will be looking at the code at all.
Imagine calling Linus a vibe coder... go look up the definition and then re-evaluate your statement.
He calls himself a vibe coder. I gave you the link. Who am I to call him a liar?
And why do you act like it's an insult? For most problems, reading and writing code by hand is dead. For the remainder, it will be soon.
Linus said that this particular project was vibe coded, not that he was a vibe coder or that he's going to vibe-code everything he does from now on.
> "Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding"
What do you call people who vibe code? When he says that he sees a 10x improvement in productivity with AI code gen, what makes you think he's going to put the tool down? Do you think he's stupid or something?
He'll keep ramping up his vibe coding, because he can see it's the future.
FreeBSD is different but i'd certainly not call it nicer, at least in the past 15 years.