FreeCORE and BSDnas emerge as community forks of abandoned TrueNAS CORE
Two independent projects rebase the discontinued FreeBSD-based TrueNAS CORE onto current systems as iXsystems shifts focus to Linux-based SCALE.
What to know
- Two independent forks—FreeCORE and BSDnas—have emerged to continue TrueNAS CORE on current FreeBSD after iXsystems abandoned the project in favor of Linux-based SCALE.
- Both forks rebase the storage OS onto FreeBSD 15 and current OpenZFS, providing ongoing security updates and compatibility without vendor control.
- User frustration centers on iXsystems' shift away from open-source principles, including stopping build script publication and discontinuing the FreeBSD platform in favor of a Linux-based commercial offering.
- Early testing shows both forks are functional for core NAS operations, though FreeCORE and BSDnas remain early-stage projects with known limitations.
The dispute Whether community forks can be trusted as long-term solutions or whether users should abandon NAS appliance software entirely for vanilla operating systems. · positions read across 98 posts and comments
These forks are valuable community initiatives that solve a real problem.
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“This is great and am wishing the team well on this endeavor!”
mxuribe · Hacker News
iXsystems betrayed open-source principles by abandoning FreeBSD CORE and restricting build access.
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“TrueNAS recently stopped publishing their build scripts, intentionally making it harder to build their open source code.”
mtlynch · Hacker News
Community forks are ephemeral and unreliable; users should use vanilla FreeBSD or established alternatives instead.
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“Why does anyone bother with these ephemeral meme distros when you can accomplish the same with vanilla FreeBSD/Illumos/Linux using standard commands and documentation?”
gnuplustoejam · Hacker News
“A fork rots when nobody moves it forward. The gap between TrueNAS CORE 13.3 and current FreeBSD did not open because of any hard technical problem — it opened because for a year nobody rebased the patches.”
BSDnas project · BSDnas official website
FreeCORE Project Team Fork maintainersiXsystems, Inc. Original TrueNAS developerBSDnas project (NexRebular) Alternative fork maintainer
The record 3 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 2 sites · best of 98 · verbatim
- Will FreeCORE and BSDnas be actively maintained long-term, or will they face the same abandonment as TrueNAS CORE?
- Does iXsystems' decision to stop publishing build scripts violate GPL requirements for "Corresponding Source"?
- Aug 31
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Make no mistake, I'm giving away HTTP/1.2 for free because I don't think there's any money to be made off of it. It's a simpler and more elegant alternative to HTTP/2 most of the time, but that does not translate into dollars like being able to use SQL semantics on a small flat file.If you want to make the world a better place, just be a friend to…
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BSDnas https:// github.com/bsdnas ― a community fork of TrueNAS CORE, kept on a FreeBSD that still gets security fixes. https://www. reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/ 1vy8ahl/bsdnas/ # AI FreeBSD # TrueNAS
- Aug 30
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What you're doing almost requires giving it away as it only has value if other people use it.One small nit: "group identity". I have no tribe, no group (alas). The only tribe I can lay claim to is humanity itself.I'm at a point in my life where one tends to ponder the value of one's actions in the scant time left to act. I try to acknowledge the…
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I'm working on something I plan to give away for free as well. I'm backporting request multiplexing into HTTP/1, calling it HTTP/1.2, and working on updates to a few HTTP servers that rejected HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. I wrote my RFC draft first to really hammer out the edge cases before I go in blind on the implementation. I just finished the RFC draft…
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I'm not contesting the need to be compensated for work.My point is that there's stuff that I have worked on to scratch an itch and don't feel the need for monetary compensation. I believe there's an intrinsic need to be part of something bigger than ones self, and participating by volunteering time to have the satisfaction of knowing that you…
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Fair enough on use of the word "courage" in this case. I will gladly walk back on things I am wrong about when I realize it. If DRH prefers the business model of giving away something for free and selling consulting support for it, then bully for him. It might result in less income, but I'm sure being a consultant is lot less stressful than…
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No one is whining about not being given enough free stuff, and you in fact have no right to criticize people for something they aren't doing.For my part, I'm simply opting for "leave it" out of "take it or leave it". I merely say WHY I'm leaving it, but choosing to use something else rather than reward trunas for doing something I don't like is…
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An ironic choice of hypothetical given that SQLite's present ubiquity is a result of a very similar licensing rug-pull on the part of Berkeley DB, after Sleepycat's acquisition by Oracle.And, in turn, bdb gained prominence on the back of AT&T claiming copyright on ndbm during the Unix Wars.So there's a long history of this, and plenty of…
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This is great and am wishing the team well on this endeavor!One nitpick is that while the site looks clean, and there seems to be some good amount of documentation, i think there was a lost opportunity for a simple, yet more universal description of *what this is*! I mean, i get that this descends from FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE...but why could they…
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I totally understand why you’ve made those choices. It just might be worth questioning how much of your own time these principles are worth.This entire time you’ve been swapping between NAS distros fiddling with your NAS box my TrueNAS SCALE installation has required approximately zero of my time and has never lost the ability to be updated.To me…
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As the others said: chasing big-corporate $$$.You can integrate a fleet of Linux storage servers with a collection of K8s clusters more easily than a you can BSD storage servers. Getting BSD and Linux talking smoothly needs Real Unix Skills.Colleagues in K8s shops tell me that their k8s guys come for help with complex tasks like.... deleting…
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Open-source is an inherently radical anti-capitalist philosophy. In your eyes everyone "deserves" what the market is willing to pay, but open-source developers would rather donate their time and energy to create or contribute to something that is freely accessible to anyone and everyone. Also, believe it or not, but some people are not motivated…
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Seems that zVault 'did not make it' - https://zvault.io/ - even the page is gone now.Lets hope FreeCORE will make it longer.Some comparison between Linux based TrueNAS SCALE and FreeBSD based TrueNAS CORE here:-
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That's a great test environment and it really helps drive away some of the misconceptions about ZFS.It's a lovely filesystem and it can work in very stodgy ways with zetabytes on Serious Hardware, but it can also work with relatively small devices on silly hardware.Another example: I've got a ZFS scratch disk that has seen dozens of terabytes…
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> I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue.Your statements clearly took issue with the fact that your company has to pay open-source devs whose work it uses for reliability. You presented the options as "pay them, or else get rugpulled", and then went on to say "how did we end up in…
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I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution.When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM.I decided to just use an existing Linux box that…
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I'll bite.They're allowed to stop publishing new work whenever they want to. That's part of the free, open-source software game, wherein: We're all free to provide as much as we wish, and also free to consume as much as we want. Nobody necessarily owes anyone else anything and it's really very beautiful in these ways. This is enabled in large part…
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Regardless the estimated quality of the new thing, there is a point and a value in penalizing the old thing when it fails to adhere to principles.One must have principles onesself to see this as imortant though.A lot of people use words like "practical" or "pragmatic" to avoid inconvenience.I've already been using zVault for a year which is a fork…
- Aug 29
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You didn't deserve to be downvoted to hell and back. People deserve to be paid for their work, and without copyright law only mega-cap companies would ever be able to capture enough value from their work to survive.People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years.Calling it a "rug pull"…
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Knowing a little about the maintainers and their model, this isn’t a private-equity cash grab or Mr Monopoly twirling his moustache; it’s a business trying to stay sustainable in open source. There are no billionaires here: they staff developers who contribute to projects like OpenZFS, and developers who build enterprise features that fund all of…
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FreeBSD with ZFS tends to be less chaotic once setup. Linux distro in storage appliances can be hit or miss, but ZFS/F2FS/CephFS for /home and ext4+Overlayfs for OS / are reliable these days.Usually, for JBOD file archiving people want to avoid cutting-edge anything. Sometimes Linux kernel less-popular fs updates add or remove data-corrupting…
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Oftentimes the alternative is migrating to one dying or unstable zero-funding open source project to the next.Which path you go down depends on a lot of factors of that particular piece of software.Can I trust FreeCORE to be a stable, secure project that hangs on to my NAS data if it’s an unfunded fork? Or would it be better to give up some…
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Torvalds is mostly merging code in the kernel, not writing modules. He claims he's a manager now: https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-summit-linus-torva...But he's very pro-ai, though, and is vibe closing other projects like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Vide-CodingLinux is definitely going to speed up as it starts to get vibe…
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What a shame I didn't discover this sooner -- I finally sent my 11-year-old TrueNAS system[1] through the one-way Linux door about a year ago because I gave up on any hope that something like this would come along and I didn't see another way to keep it current.The migration path went smoothly but I preferred the FreeBSD setup if only because it…