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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 openness for something like TrueNAS SCALE?

When it comes to stuff like Proxmox and TrueNAS I think a lot of what keeps those good products for homelab use is the fact that they have commercial customers paying for the development. I can count on TrueNAS being around and getting updates because they have a proven revenue stream.

That said, it’s a balance, because sometimes that commercialization becomes a rug pull. A lot of the viability of those projects for homelab use revolves around the companies that put those products out recognizing that they have a customer base that will not pay and accepting that fact without deciding to try to squeeze out every last person who just might pay by compromising the free edition.

I like the way Proxmox and OpnSense handle this: you get the community patch channels which are “not for production use” which scares the corporate businesses into paying but has zero negative impact for home users.

To be clear I’m also not saying FreeCORE specifically is a fly-by-night project or unstable or anything. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with it. I’m just saying, sometimes projects like that end up not being the right choice for certain use cases.

Nobody wants to fund it.

But, at this point, AI makes code cheap enough that I would just fork the open source software and maintain it, instead of paying for a third party. Heck, even with saas, I may clone internally.

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 it. Their business is being challenged by “global” shops taking advantage of the platforms openness - and this isn’t the virtuous or even legally tenable type of competition. It’s “violating terms and not legally accessible” competition, and they are taking measures. It sucks for everyone.

If TrueNAS/iX whatever turns around and sells to Bending Spoons, then I’ll of course owe you a beer. Until then, their leadership is just trying keep the project alive - and funding other open source efforts at the same time.

Maybe AI fucks all of this up, who knows ….

Why is it not enough to give you all of their code for free? Why do they also have obligations and expectations beyond that? The entitlement never ends!

> At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled.

"Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.

Ha interesting, any idea why the FreeBSD variant was discontinued? This was one of the projects I always associated with FreeBSD.

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-Coding

Linux is definitely going to speed up as it starts to get vibe coded. In a few years, I bet that it's all going to be built with agentic loops, and nobody will be looking at the code at all.