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.
I think the main issue for many, as is the case so often, is the moving chair issue. Most people don’t have a problem with their chair being moved prior to them sitting down. But, at least in my experience, almost all have an issue with it being moved without prior knowledge of said move.
Other than that, I have empathy for both sides. Of course it seems a bit iffy for the community seeing that and other little changes you are making which don’t really inspire confidence. The wording here as well:
One could interpret that as no new features ever coming to the community version again, because it did mean that in many other projects. Is that what you meant or what is happening? I seriously doubt it. But I hope you see my point.
On the other hand, especially with LLMs and a seeming disregard for the work, ethics, ideas, intellectual property or wishes of others in the world right now - except when it comes to the proprietors of said LLMs, then they get really angry if you “copy” their stuff - I do understand that certain safeguards are being employed to prevent reckless theft of code. And while this is unpopular: Yes, it is theft in my eyes, especially if nothing is given back to the projects and it is then even commercialised, like with LLMs. And no, legal and ethical definitions are not the same. For me. Not a lawyer.
So, I’m in two minds about that, honestly. I can only hope for the best.
My question is though, can this still be called “Open Enterprise Storage”? I think many of us started using, recommending and trusting FreeNAS/TrueNAS because of the openness. And this is what seems to be eroded away more and more over the last years. For me at least, this also has an impact on recommendations in the professional world, e.g. purchasing new equipment. But I digress. I need to think about it more, this is just my first reaction.
This is something I’ve discussed in previous conversations, but it’s worth repeating here again. 99%+ of all the “work” to create TrueNAS is done by professional engineering staff. Not to count all the other efforts in testing, documentation and myriad of other work that takes place before a single user is able to go and hit the “update” button to grab that shiny new release. I don’t recall the single last major feature that ever was contributed to TrueNAS (or even going back to FreeNAS) as a purely community led contribution. The last non-TrueNAS sponsored change to the build scripts was in early 2024 to give you an idea.
Understanding that reality, it means every feature we add, has a fairly substantial cost to it. In real dollars. Engineers don’t run off of community “Good vibes”, they have families to provide for as well. So it means we have to carefully consider each and every new feature. What does it cost to add. What does it cost to maintain (potentially forever). Then that informs where it sits in the free vs paid scheme of things. With every release we have a pretty healthy mix of free goodies, as well as some more targeted functionality at enterprise customers who pay the bills. Thats how most major open source projects (which aren’t just a labor of love) has always worked, and again TrueNAS is no exception here.
One thing unique about TrueNAS though, is that the developers tend to also be just as rabid users and enthusiasts of TrueNAS as a lot of our community members are. So that helps us keep a healthy perspective on what we bring to the free side of the equation, since selfishly we also want a lot of these functionalities on our own home labs. If anything that passion steers the equation too hard in that free direction at times
I don’t doubt that. But we professionals - no matter the field - tend to forget what we built on the free work of others and value our work more. Since we were the ones doing it. And what is the old Open Source message, again? Contributions don’t have to be code. They can be good bug reports, translations, community support in forums and so on.
Also, never underestimate the home lab to enterprise route. I for one test almost all the solutions we then use in enterprise myself at home in my home lab. If a solution is not available that way, it is only ever considered if management seriously overrules me/us. You can interpret this as an attack on your stance or as a confirmation of your openness in providing features for the community. Now you know how we feel with every announcement
That answer makes me a bit uneasy. Not because of the content itself - that is very correct and should be relatively obvious to most truenas user imho.
What I find irritating is that it doesn’t really have anything to do with the part of @ProfessionalAmateur’s message that you’re citing. Your answer doesn’t address the possibility of this change meaning no new features ever coming to TrueNAS CE again. You seem to be evading the question.
While I also don’t think that this (no new features) is what you were trying to say I still think it needs a clearer statement.
Don’t disagree with any of this here. We do see and value that testing work, bug reports and other similar in-kind contributions like that. Its one of the primary values in even having a free side to the product, otherwise we’d be on the hook to 100% of that effort in house. But that said we still like to put our best foot forward on all releases, so (hopefully) the community feels less like a test bed and gets to experience a polished product on day 1.
This is one of the big shift’s we’ve made with the cadence to TrueNAS 26 going back to an annual release cycle. Longer test cycles. More internal testing and soak time. A focus on making sure features are scoped for “Enterprise Readiness” on day 1. Not after they go through 6-12 months of churn with the community first. So that means our own costs will be going up to do that early testing and polish. Before it hits the wild west that is our massive community user base. I think most folks in the end will appreciate it, since while you do want to test and help find bugs, most folks are happier if things “just work”
That is adressed in the paragraph towards the end. Features are assessed on a feature by feature basis, as has been the case up until now and will continue to be the case in the future.
Whether or not you believe or trust iX to not alter how they apply that in practice is a different matter.
I still don’t understand why/how iXsystems believes that close-sourcing the build process is going to somehow deter rules-breakers from continuing to build and commercialize TN CE.
I did read it and while it basically states “the devs want new features to be in the free version too as that’s what they’re running at home” it doesn’t explicitly answer the question you initially replied to.
I did understand of course that new features, and probably more than would be profitable for iX sometimes, will get to the Community Edition - which makes me very happy - but it was still a long reply where the implicit answer was buried in a relatively eloquently formulated sentence right at the end.
I fear(ed) this might confuse users whose first language isn’t English (just like it is for me ).
I think your enterprise customers would even value that more. If only there was a way of testing stuff with many people who are perfectly capable of breaking stuff in ways developers don’t really think about. So… open enterprise testing/development train confirmed?
In a perfect world? Sure. But alas we do not live in a perfect world. The death of a lot of open source projects is in competing too heavily with their own free versions for business dollars. Frankly a lot of the Enterprise functionality we’re rolling out doesn’t have a good community test base these days. Not to say none of it does, but its sure not all of it, especially judging by how much we find and fix internally here
Was worth a try. And we all should be trying to make the world we want to have a little better, which we - here in the forum - seem to have in common. In our little niche. With what we can influence. But this shows my age and gets into the philosophical.
We also use TrueNAS CE at my workplace - not (only) because it is free but (as far as I was told - this was before I started working here) because TrueNAS enterprise can only be used on TrueNAS hardware and that was just very far from price-competitive at the time new storage systems were acquired here. I think supporting TrueNAS Enterprise on just any hardware would be way more trouble than it would be worth but I think lot’s of enterprises would buy TrueNAS licenses just for “proper” support if they were allowed to use them on other hardware.
Because there are parts that are not really part of the conversation. And I for one like it when conversations stay on topic. Mostly. It is an old habit, hope you don’t mind.
Edit: But as you can see, having an opinion and something to say is also an old habit of mine
Question 1: Will the distribution format remain an ISO, that anyone can download, install and redistribute at least inside an own org at will, or are you contemplating to tighten this as well (binary-only installer, download through some kind of store requiring all kinds of personal information, …) like e.g. pfSense did?
Question 2: While not having the build environment will undoubtedly slow the bad actors down, it is not a rocket science either. It is a common Linux distribution with an additional software on top of it after all. By the time of a few betas are out someone will have that in place. So, is it really just the build scripts, or are there going to be more roadblocks?
Question 3: The middleware’s README states “To build this source repository, please refer to the instructions provided at: https://github.com/truenas/truenas-build.”. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is LGPL v3 and as far as I remember, providing installation information is mandatory (TrueNAS CE IMO definitely falls under the “User Product” category).
That is curious. “Providing installation information” does not strike me as necessarily intended to refer to or meant to be read as “build instructions”. Building from source and installing the finished products are two different things in my mind. But clearly, IANAL.
There is a definition of that term the lawyers can discuss for hours, but yes, it is meant to cover everything from doing your modification to actually running it:
“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.
).