TrueNAS now closed source

Seems to be a common theme with popular Open Source Products these last few years. Go Closed Source to try to get some profit, Redis, MiniIO, Elastic etc. I've been running vanilla FreeBSD with ZFS for my NAS for ages now, pretty much no chance of that going closed source and with a great license if it did want to try. Obviously lacking a GUI but I pretty much never log into my NAS ever and it's managed via code. It just serves content.
 
That's a shame I guess. I think I had forgotten even that freenas had become truenas. Last time I recall looking at options like freenas, snapraid, flexraid, zfs etc. I largely settled on unraid for a number of reasons. I've never regretted that choice to be honest. Been running it for well over a decade.
 
Response from CTO on the matter


Hey everyone,

I’ve seen the concerns in the Community about us moving the build scripts internal for TrueNAS 27, so I want to address this directly.

Why we did it: We had a growing problem with bad actors forking TrueNAS, selling closed-source commercial derivatives under their own brands, and ignoring GPL and other licensing obligations. No attribution. No contribution back to the project. No support for the community or the engineering effort that built what they’re reselling. Unfortunately, many of these are in regions where we have little to no legal recourse. To address this challenge, we were already planning to take the build scripts internal. With the upcoming refactor of the new Secure Boot feature, along with myriad other changes we wanted to make to the build infrastructure, TrueNAS 27 was a natural time to make this change.

What this does NOT mean: We are not paywalling existing free features. Period. If it’s free today, it stays free.

What hasn’t changed: We’ve always made decisions about which new features are fully open source (GPL or BSD), which are proprietary, and which land in the free edition vs. TrueNAS Enterprise products. That’s how we fund the engineering that builds TrueNAS for everyone. That model isn’t new, and it isn’t changing.

Happy to answer questions.

— Kris
 
R.C.Anderson said:
If what the CTO said is true & remains to be true, this doesn't sound like a particularly bad thing IMO. This is quite a bit "If", however.
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Reads like bog standard PR talk to when something gets a bad reaction. They like to make it much more frustrating to download the community edition, especially with an Ad Blocker too which is pretty telling.
 
Throrik said:
Reads like bog standard PR talk to when something gets a bad reaction. They like to make it much more frustrating to download the community edition, especially with an Ad Blocker too which is pretty telling.
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Yea, does sound a lot like Corportate BS. I guess time will tell. Will be interesting to see how much this affects their market share.
 
As long as they don't do a PFSense and remove offline installers, then for 99% of people the build scripts being removed is a non-issue.
 
whitecrook said:
> moving the build scripts internal

what does that actually mean?
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jonneymendoza said:
No idea what that even means
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It means that whilst the source code is still available and likely legally complies with the open source license, they've made it incredibly hard to actually use it by removing the scripts that allow the source to be built.

Whilst for smaller pieces of software it would be an inconvenience, for something of this scale it makes it almost impossible, due to the sheer number of individual software components that need to be compiled (each of which have their own set of dependencies etc)
 
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