jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
Fiiiiiiine...... make me suffer through figuring out vBulletin, see if I care... but yeah I've written several things about this.
I should probably disclose that I'm the primary developer behind another open source project (and one that's even sort-of a storage product, albeit a highly specialized protocol-specific one), and one that, due to its nature, is primarily used by multi-gigabit service providers... so I'm more familiar (and more cynical) about the pros and cons of free software development and how that all gets leveraged in order to help earn a living, or not, as the case may be.
I think you guys are missing the reality here.
FreeNAS is fundamentally a wrapper around FreeBSD and a bunch of ports. It's a *nice* wrapper, but it's a wrapper.
ZFS v15 is what shipped with FreeBSD 8.2R, the latest stable RELEASE on the FreeBSD 8 branch. FreeBSD 8.3R is expected to be released in early 2012. ZFS v28 has already been committed to 8-STABLE, and will therefore be part of 8.3R.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...ne/011673.html
Now here's the thing. iXsystems adds value to their TrueNAS product by including v28 features. That much is absolutely true.
However, when FreeBSD 8.3R comes out, there will be an eventual need to move forward with the base system, which is how you get new device drivers, bug fixes, security updates, and the like. iXsystems is probably not interested in trying to fork FreeBSD in order to keep v28 out of the base system; there will be no more FreeBSD releases with v15. So there aren't realistic paths forward that do not include ZFS v28 as part of the FreeBSD release that FreeNAS will be based on.
Even if they tried, basically there are a lot of real clever people who would just take a more recent NanoBSD build and dump the FreeNAS stuff on top of it and start hacking and distributing it. So it doesn't seem likely that they'll try.
The iXsystems value-add will eventually need to be their support capabilities/opportunities, the hardware sales, and the desire of many businesses to be able to buy an appliance and support and not have to worry about "hacking."
Along the way, they benefit from the FreeNAS community, their more-or-less willing guinea pigs. Now you can either enjoy a nearly commercial grade product for free or you can go buy a commercial NAS product for cash; generally speaking, the quality of FreeNAS is sufficiently high that even experienced admins are willing to consider it as a viable option.
But basically, when someone offers free beer, and also sells snacks alongside, it's kind of rude to complain that the snacks aren't free too. Coders need to feed their families too.
I should probably disclose that I'm the primary developer behind another open source project (and one that's even sort-of a storage product, albeit a highly specialized protocol-specific one), and one that, due to its nature, is primarily used by multi-gigabit service providers... so I'm more familiar (and more cynical) about the pros and cons of free software development and how that all gets leveraged in order to help earn a living, or not, as the case may be.
I think you guys are missing the reality here.
FreeNAS is fundamentally a wrapper around FreeBSD and a bunch of ports. It's a *nice* wrapper, but it's a wrapper.
ZFS v15 is what shipped with FreeBSD 8.2R, the latest stable RELEASE on the FreeBSD 8 branch. FreeBSD 8.3R is expected to be released in early 2012. ZFS v28 has already been committed to 8-STABLE, and will therefore be part of 8.3R.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...ne/011673.html
Now here's the thing. iXsystems adds value to their TrueNAS product by including v28 features. That much is absolutely true.
However, when FreeBSD 8.3R comes out, there will be an eventual need to move forward with the base system, which is how you get new device drivers, bug fixes, security updates, and the like. iXsystems is probably not interested in trying to fork FreeBSD in order to keep v28 out of the base system; there will be no more FreeBSD releases with v15. So there aren't realistic paths forward that do not include ZFS v28 as part of the FreeBSD release that FreeNAS will be based on.
Even if they tried, basically there are a lot of real clever people who would just take a more recent NanoBSD build and dump the FreeNAS stuff on top of it and start hacking and distributing it. So it doesn't seem likely that they'll try.
The iXsystems value-add will eventually need to be their support capabilities/opportunities, the hardware sales, and the desire of many businesses to be able to buy an appliance and support and not have to worry about "hacking."
Along the way, they benefit from the FreeNAS community, their more-or-less willing guinea pigs. Now you can either enjoy a nearly commercial grade product for free or you can go buy a commercial NAS product for cash; generally speaking, the quality of FreeNAS is sufficiently high that even experienced admins are willing to consider it as a viable option.
But basically, when someone offers free beer, and also sells snacks alongside, it's kind of rude to complain that the snacks aren't free too. Coders need to feed their families too.