Chris and Kris take this episode of TrueNAS Tech Talk to respond and clear the air about recent changes made to the build scripts repository on GitHub, and this means for TrueNAS users. They’ll talk about the “Enterprise-First” focus, how feature requests are reviewed and sorted, and where Community Edition is headed.
Why we did it… we actually have a growing problem… Not so good actors that fork TrueNAS
Please help me understand this. I am not trying to create any more reddit drama, but this sounds so ridiculous to me, I have to be missing something.
So my guess would be, that there are mostly these users groups.
the tinkerer:
This person builds a TrueNAS out of old hardware as a hobby. You won’t see any money from this person. This homelab user will not give you much money. Maybe if you paywall the enterprise release train and have attractive pricing like 80$ a year, this user will buy a license. Similar to Proxmox licensing. The community would probably even welcome that change and consider it to be a small donation.
the small business user:
This user just wants a nice TrueNAS mini prebuilt, because building it with some kind of HPE Proliant Gen10 would cost more time than it saves money. Support is nice, but not missing critical. So no expensive contracts here either.
I am in that group. Unfortunatly over the last years, this has changed for the worse.
So yeah, while I would like to pay 300$ extra to get a rebranded Supermicro from you guys, you don’t even give me that.
the mission critical user:
This user wants direct support to you guys and is willing to pay good money to have a phone line. He/she would never ever buy a Supermicro from Aliexpress.
so who are these people buying forked TrueNAS builds?
Could be guys like me, in the smb user group. But that one is IMHO on you guys. If you are not willing to sell in the EU, don’t act surprised when people look for alternatives. So while I am happy that you address our fears and don’t seem to be taking the pfSense route, I still think that the motivation behind this move is probably ill advised.
If someone, whoever they may be, removed the truenas branding, added their own “shitty nas os name” branding compile it and then sell it as their own software to customers, or even ship it preinstalled on some Ali express nas boxes I can understand the reason why that change was made…
I really don’t. If someone like that is able to steal from your customers, you are doing something very wrong.
Well to be honest, this is exactly what the GPL is meant for. Of course, you must give your users the very same rights you’ve got with the GPL-licensed code. If the “bad actors” are not doing that, that’s unfair, illegal and hard to fight in some places of the world, but it does not change much - the “damage” is done regardless of whether the source is published or not. But forking the code and selling it to whoever is willing to pay, modified or unmodified, is something that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has chosen GPL as the license. Re-branding is equally fine; you don’t see Debian anywhere when you log into the TrueNAS box, unless you dig into /etc/os-release and similar, right? It is in fact a must as TrueNAS is a ®.
It is understandable that iX wants to protect their revenue stream coming from selling the complete appliance and at least want the free users to look at the TrueNAS logo with the hope that they will promote and recommend their brand, but with GPL it is notoriously hard to have your cake and eat it too here. In the GPL world the mere fact of making money with your code is not immoral per se.
Perhaps you should read into the latest blog around TrueNAS Connect as that’s part of the purpose of that software:
While we have not laid out the exact feature set or process, it is part of the plan to have enablement of select Enterprise features, delivered via TNC.
We have an entire distribution network of partners across the EU in order to provide direct sales, support, and pricing that includes VAT as well as local inventories for both sales and support, so I’m not sure where this is coming from.
That’s exactly what’s going on. Again, to repeat what was said in the episode - there’s no problems with forks as long as the GPL and licenses are respected. And we (TrueNAS) do that with regards to upstream sources that we’re forking. We commit a bunch of code upstream, not just to OpenZFS, but to Samba, NFS, iSCSI targets, and more.
But that same respect isn’t happening from downstream - we’re not seeing “forks” as much as we are:
git pull
sed s/truenas/totallynewnas/g *
make clean
apologies for the bad pseudo-code there, but you get the idea.
To anyone who is not following the license, then per the license they have not accepted the terms. If they have not accepted the terms, then they have no right whatsoever to the code. Therefore are violating the copyright of all the copyright holders and copyright law globally is extremely powerful. This is what lawyers are for. (I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Everyone, ask yourself this: does this change respect the The Four Essential Freedoms?
The 2 biggest countries population wise in the world dont respect copyright laws - good luck with lawyers there !
This episode was infuriating to watch.
You answered questions that are very obvious and completely ignored ones like what will happen to the ARM fork, how people are supposed to contribute if they can’t build TrueNAS, who are the copycats that are stated as the main reason for the change, etc, all with a condescending and ridiculing tone.
None of them I can find on your homepage, nor was it mentioned last time I requested a quote. How am I supposed to know, which partners you have in Switzerland?
But why should that bother you? That can’t be a big customer crowd, can it?
I mean who pays someone to build a system, instead of building it themselves, but then at the same time is ok with not getting official support from you guys?
That has to be a very small unimportant minority?
That’s why we’ve end up with QNAP with QuTS OS that also support ZFS
This makes sense to me. I like getting truenas for free. If the IP is just ripped off then this puts TN the company at risk not just the free software so they would have no choice to make it all closed source.
It costs money to make TN and I don’t give them any.
But they should sort out selling in the UK 
Note to iX: A first bridge from CE to Enterprise would be an easy-to-find list of international retail partners/retail channels. Should cost less to develop than Connect.
On rebasing on OpenSolaris, there is one very good ZFS feature in Illumos that is not available on Linux: [Not accepted] Implement zfs aclimplicit to control granting implicit privileges to change file ownership and ACL
I’m not sure how enterprise customers accept that end users can change permissions on NFSv4 completely accidentally, let alone on-purpose (“Evan did it, look at the file ownership…”). Maybe admins just have’t noticed. This should be a CVE.
i dont trust this. … we have seen lots of rug pulls over the years. this simply smells like one.
no way to prove either. but thats the vibe I’m feeling, and, tbh, it’s a bit dissapointing…
EDIT. Hope I’m wrong 
btw the reason I wrote this is - honeybadger came off as honest (as always) but the other guy hiding from the camera and sly smiling… not very confidence inspiring….. hope Moore doesnt override your ideals @HoneyBadger