TrueNAS now closed source

ChrisD. · 2026-03-10T20:55:05+0000

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rpck7k/truenas_build_system_going_closed_source

End of TrueNAS free? I’m not its biggest fan but this is a big deal.

RavenLunatic · 2026-03-10T21:45:52+0000

If true wont it just be forked with a different name, like what happened to open office.

Throrik · 2026-03-11T09:27:00+0000

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.

RavenLunatic · 2026-03-11T09:37:51+0000

HexOS being a paid for GUI for TrueNAS might have been more popular than expected even at $199.

jaybee · 2026-03-11T09:52:35+0000

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.

RavenLunatic · 2026-03-11T12:33:51+0000

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