Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there was much interest in our actual plans for the future. Hopefully, given time, they'll be able to better understand our trajectory.
Lets be pessimistic for a second myself:
I do see what IX tries to be doing here, its call: "Hedging their bets". If FreeBSD declines more, they can easily move to Linux this way and continue without much commerical interuption.
But:
Even being that pessimistic: You can't blindly say that hedging one's bets means someone is planning to move away.
- Do I personally(!) see IX moving away from FreeBSD in 10 years? With the current road FreeBSD is going, Yes. But that does not mean they would do so without regret or need.
Back to normal me:
It's actually bloody good bussiness practice to BOTH open a new product (which increases sales) AND hedge your bets in case your other product starts to loose potential. Heding requires Linux and the New (scale-out) solution requires Linux. So win-win bussiness wise.
When SCALE launches, I don't expect enterprises to jump on it right away, it would still take a year or 2 of traction with the tech community to get enterprises interested. For that very reason I don't expect many SCALE appliances at launch right away.
After it is gaining traction I expect more of the non-HA enterprise solutions being converted to SCALE offerings. Because on those platforms SCALE would just simply offer more bang-for-bug and IX would be able to also sell those same hardware systems as scale-out solutions.
After about 5 years after SCALE launch I would expect 3 catagories of hardware products from IX:
1. Enthousiast NAS devices without HA running TrueNAS Core
2. Medium bussiness HA storage using TrueNAS Enterprise
3. High density storage without HA, but with TrueNAS SCALE.
Why wouldn't they move the other offerings?
TrueNAS Core:
*BSD is known to be very solid without intervention. It's ideal for 24-7 consumer devices like NAS's in my opinion. But also: It's a giant userbase to get feedback on the enterprise solution. There is no storage solution that has so many users on different kinds of hardware, it generate A LOT of usefull feedback and thus stability which would also be usefull for the Enterprise offering.
TrueNAS Enterprise:
Trust, Enterprises trust the FreeBSD based offering and would expect both support and development of the platform. Breaching said trust without good reasoning, would costs IX a SIGNIFICANT amount of money.
IF FreeBSD starts to decline (and thats the IF):
If after 10 years we see FreeNAS failing, IX can firstoff easily scrap TrueNAS Core and replace it with a SCALE-based offering. Enterprise would take some time, (due to service life) but about 5 years later we would see Enterprise being mostly replace by SCALE-based solutions too.
Conclusion:
With above analysis I don't see any reason to expect IX Systems is currently already planning to move away from FreeBSD. It would objectively not make any sense.