Following community concerns about moving TrueNAS build infrastructure to internal systems, iXsystems published a blog post, “Building a Bridge Between Community & Enterprise,” outlining its long-term vision and introducing TrueNAS Connect.
According to iXsystems, the goal is to create a bridge between the free Community Edition and enterprise-grade capabilities traditionally available only to customers using official TrueNAS hardware appliances.
TrueNAS Connect is a centralized platform for managing licensing and enabling additional capabilities. It will provide remote monitoring, centralized management, proactive alerts, and other enterprise tools across multiple systems.
iXsystems emphasizes that the core platform remains open source and the Community Edition will continue to be free. Users can still download, install, and run TrueNAS on their own hardware.
At the same time, the new service introduces a structured approach for accessing advanced capabilities. TrueNAS Connect will include multiple tiers, starting with a free “Foundation” level and expanding to paid options that unlock additional enterprise functionality.
The announcement clarifies the business model: TrueNAS uses an open-core approach, keeping the base software open source while offering advanced services commercially. iXsystems states this model sustains development and keeps the core platform accessible to the community.
So, to sum up, for the Community Edition users, the core experience will remain unchanged, as TrueNAS will continue to offer its existing ZFS-based storage platform.
IXsystems has no obligation to continue to support their free tier. The parts that are open source can be maintained by anyone. iXsystems has not, though, done anything to deprecate the Community Edition at this point. Personally, I’m grateful for the work iXsystems has done for the community edition and I benefit greatly from it.
Literally yesterday I decided NOT to use TrueNAS jails because I didn’t want to build something that could get locked behind yet another subscription paywall in a future version of TrueNAS. This article confirms I made the right call.
This is how you cook a frog, you raise the temperature slowly so the frog doesn’t notice.
They’ll get us used to the new model, then when the dust has settled and everyone’s locked into the foundation version due to feature updates, they’ll start migrating features from free to mid tier, and eventually from mid tier to high tier.
That’s great, but…. Were is the open source going to be hosted. If it is only on iX systems then there are still issues.
Also – the use of the core wording here to indicate core services, rather than CORE (FreeBSD) vs SCALE (Debian) is ambiguous. Do they intend to separate the two? Will there be feature disparity between core, enterprise, CORE and SCALE?
Core was deprecated quite some time ago and Scale was renamed to Community.