@whitenoise The community doesn’t pay for new features, and the community will leave if better options come along. Basically it makes sense to lay this all out here, like the primary focus being Enterprise and then some small subscriptions aka TrueNAS Connect.
There’s plenty of other options for NAS OS’s, before TrueNAS and afterwards, and if the free product stagnates, then no enterprise will use the product anyways
While I’m very critical regarding recent dramas, I don’t buy this. The world is volatile. Cost is a bigger factor than ever, as is access. I once got a quote in a professional capacity from iXsystems. It was admitedly more than I was expecting, but still relatively easy to get a salesperson to take a (relatively) small business seriously and at least return a quote.
I (perceive) iXsystems as still having a market to play in, and that market heating up as large incumbents have basically already sold all their remaining stock.
RISC V may be up and coming, at least for parts of the world.
Tbh those parts of the world can write their own build scripts if they want. It’s extremely niche, right now risc v software support is still very early days, and the hardware cannot handle certain tasks because the cores are so slow.
To that point: This just removes the easy button, right? Nothing at all stops anyone from forking TrueNAS, adding build scripts to the fork, and maintaining those build scripts.
Am I missing something? Building your own TrueNAS is expert-level nerdery. Surely expert-level nerds can also maintain a github repo with build scripts if they so desire?
That’s pretty much been my experience. K3s worked, the move to Docker worked. Minimal drama.
LXC was a fun thing to experiment with, but it’s not going to run anything but a playground for me.
If I used home assistant, I might be a bit upset about the VM back and forth. A rollback would have set it right, and eventually VMs became sane again. Without home assistant, I don’t need VMs. I’m glad they’re there for tinkering, I may even use one here and there to test something.
There’s a type of user that dials all the knobs. Likely that’s also where statements like “I could never run TrueNAS long term without the option to move everything to plain Debian” come from.
That type of user may need to pay a bit more attention to release notes, and be ready to roll back, and provide feedback and bug reports with debugs. Which is great for the rest of us, and I’m glad those people that can treat storage as a hobby exist.
My own use case is a little simpler. Two apps, one of which custom. If I’m feeling very antsy, it might become four apps by 2027. Haven’t decided yet. One SMB share with three distinct datasets, two of which are in active use. One SMB user, one admin user. Three pools, one of which is strictly for testing, and one that handles apps.
I’m probably neither on the basic nor advanced end of TrueNAS home users, but somewhere in between.
And for me at least, “slap the update button and if need be, tweak a little” has worked. Even when being aggressive with updates, like moving to 25.10.1 instead of waiting for 25.10.2.x. A conservative user would still be on 25.04 and move to 25.10.2 soon-ish, after it’s been declared safe.
Generally those nerds have their expert level in the - niche or not - area they want to address. If someone wants to contribute a RISC V fork or a middleware module providing (and maintaining) something iX does not want to, or at least not yet, he/she probably does not want to spend time reverse-engineering and maintaining of how to put the ISO together or say the format of the manual update file. Maintaining the build environment is hard, boring and unrewarding. Been there, done that (in an embedded world, before Yocto came).
Again, this won’t stop the “bad actors”, they have the financial incentive to do that. It is those nerds who are affected, and the users, who would like to see those features they are not going to get from iX, paid or not. Sometimes the nerds get angry enough to fork the whole product - pfSense / OPNsense come to mind with a similar setup and issues, ultimately resulting in a relatively successful fork doing its own evolution (i.e. by far not just a rebranded pfSense). I have of course no idea how much sales, if any, Netgate lost due to it over the years, and whether they regret anything.
I have no doubts that iX themselves decided for Debian as their base system also because of their long history of having each and every part open and with no for-profit company behind also with the least probability of suddenly pulling a rug on something for commercial reasons.
Fair enough: You are saying what ix is doing will minimally inconvenience the bad actors and not stop them at all; while massively inconveniencing enthusiast users.
Surely that can be discovered. I’d encourage ix to keep a close eye on their copycats. If the closing of the build scripts doesn’t meaningfully curb their activity, then consider making your secret sauce open again, to help enthusiasts.
Sad to see the build scripts go. 
And I worry about the future of new features in the free version and the practice of limiting them artificially combined with cloud connectivity requirements…
For example WebShare/TrueSearch. Are these going to be open source?
I’d be interested in making these features work without the truenas.direct requirement but I doubt iX would be open to such a PR…
I think there are some more layers to this point than just single “checksum comparison”.
Having access to the build scripts allows me to create a local build under my control, after having vetted the source code. I should be able to trust this build, as I had full control over it.
Yes, in a perfect world with deterministic builds, I could verify that my local build is identical to the official release build. And then extend the trust of my local build to that release build. That would be nice.
But in a world with non-deterministic builds, there is no point in doing so. (As you mentioned.) However, I can still trust my local build. Removing access to the build scripts disables that. Suddenly, I am forced to decide “how much do I trust the official release?”. And however much that is, it will almost always be lower than a local build.
Do I, personally, build everything I use from source? Honestly: No, often not. But the ability to do so (if I were to take that route) is a huge deciding factor for choosing anything I personally use. And being able to see others actually building and deploying your software helps building my trust far more than that checksum.
Will I stop using TrueNAS if the build scripts are no longer available? Probably not, though I will reassess my choices.
Will I still recommend TrueNAS? Probably not anymore: How can I recommend something to anybody, if I cannot fully trust it?
Would I switch to a fork of TrueNAS, that provides build scripts, but has some other issues? Maybe. It would at the very least make me rethink my choices again.
Tbh finding one that’s maintained is low probability. zVault forked CORE, did a first release, and there it stopped. No activity on their github since May 2025. No stable release, no 13.5 update, certainly no 14.0 work.
My assumption is they found how much work it is to maintain a storage appliance - and will get back to it “any month now”.
Truenas is not an enterprise solution.
Homelab, sure.
Backup target, pretty good.
Enterprise 24x7, hard no.
Their whole business model suggests otherwise…
Kris, I’m sorry to put this so bluntly, but this reason sounds like complete rubbish, so I hope you clarify:
Can you explain clearly and in concrete terms how and why do you think making your build scripts private will deter these “bad actors”? Why won’t these “bad actors” continue violating your open source license by just continuing to distribute the same exact version they are distributing today? And why won’t they trivially back port all the new features and bug fixes from the open-source components that you’re still publishing?
And secondly, why are these “bad actors” such a threat to your business model? You said they’re in regions where you don’t have legal recourse. Are they in a market that iXsystems have, or are actively pursing, a significant presence, either by direct product offerings or through partnerships with local technology companies? What kind of customer of yours, past, current or future, would choose these bad actors instead of iXsystems and why?
If this is genuinely the reason, I think you’re severely underestimating the risk of alienating your own costumers and your own community.
I’m afraid critical thinking isn’t welcome here.
I think community can maintain their own build scripts. It’s open source and community effort is the core of open source 
Show the true open source spirit, fork the original build scripts and maintain them. Show everyone that you don’t just want free stuff but are willing to do the hard work yourself. 
Well this is sad as someone that really likes Truenas for Personal Use.
This change nearly kills all my chances to get Truenas implemented as a simple and quick Storage solution for a medium Security Network in the EU, since it would just be another US Company providing a closed source storage Solution with uncertainty regarding future Updates.
While I would like to believe that Future Updates will carry trough with secure and private Build’s I have been burnt by enough Projects, that got worse and worse the more closed they got.
I do understand the reasons for the change, although it shall be interesting how well this will go through, as stated in multiple comments here quiet a few people do come from the Community Version at home to the Business Side of things.
Regarding the ability to get users from Community to paid. I believe one problem is, I am currently uncertain if you offer enterprise licenses without the need to buy your specific hardware. I believe a middle tier License would actually work great for small to medium businesses that want to use Truenas, a License that enables some of the Enterprise Features and just a cut down support Plan, a Option that would have it’s recommended deployment be inside a VM for ease of support.
Maybe even offer a Pro Licenses for Home users similar to the Chocolatey Project, i would certainly be willing to spend a few dollars to try some of the Enterprise features at home if I had an upfront cost I would know. Some of us just want some NVMe-oF
You might consider joining and helping improve the Sylve project, which is based on FreeBSD and 100% open with a BSD 2-clause license.
The FreeBSD foundation received a considerable amount from the EU Digital Sovereignty Fund to improve on CI and reproducable builds. The entire ecosystem is far from dead.
Sylve itself of course is currently an MVP - minimal viable product - rather than a complete solution, but the pace of development is amazing, the community growing, funding secured for the forseeable future …
Kind regards,
Patrick
Are there plans to offer home users free “lab” licenses to unlock all features? Like how pfsense or portainer does?
Also SMART used to be a free feature, I still have my long/short jobs in my job list. Now I have to use a 3rd party container to do it all. So dont say your not paywalling features that used to be free.
I think all ‘add on’ features would be offered by TrueNAS Connect.
SMART changes were made across all versions, Community and Enterprise, so there is no pay walling. The reason for changes to SMART have been posted in the forums and the T3 TrueNAS Tech Talk on YouTube.
Oh, where in the gui can I see the stats/results of each test? Those were easily accessible before, now there is no log.
It’s not a paywall if the feature is removed from all editions of the software.
This is true. The only options I’m aware of right now is either run 25.04 or use third-party apps like you already mentioned. Or drop to the CLI and call smartctl manually.
