Especially not one I have to "subscribe" to.

The whole idea is just ridiculously stupid.

One without support for something as simple as groups and where everything has 777 permissions by design.

I’m a Pro licence owner and I tested Unraid for about a year until moving to TrueNAS and Proxmox.

Yeah no kidding, paying for unraid?

TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) keeps getting better, for free. It does most of the same tricks that the big boy appliances do, but with your commodity hardware, at no cost.

And it does all this exceedingly well. AND if you want.. you can buy support. At your discretion.

I don’t have half the world’s RAM to give to ZFS on my budget NAS tho, and Unraid allows mismatched drive sizes, which is pretty attractive to budget users. TrueNAS is definitely great though.

I was considering grabbing a last minute legacy license, but I really don't have a use case for unraid. I need a NAS for storage and a few VMs. And my apps run on generic SBCs or NUCs which I manage through ssh/ansible. So yeah, TrueNAS it is for me as well.

Yeah this seems like a really reasonable way to make this change. You also don’t lose access to Starter or Unleashed if you don’t pay that version upgrade fee, they will let you keep downloading the version you’d paid up until. Having it be a unified upgrade fee for both is nice too. I think it makes clear that it’s to cover ongoing development and support in a way that’s more transparent than a lot of software subscriptions.

They also still allow you to buy a lifetime license, even if it’s more expensive. Considering Broadcom’s VMware just removed all of their perpetual options, it’s nice to see a different company going against that trend.

I would like to see them offering lifetime upgrades at the end of your first year with Unleashed though. Paying $140 to upgrade to that rather than $36 for a year makes a lot of sense at that point. If it’s a new customer they might not want to commit upfront.

Edit:

You can upgrade from Starter to Lifetime for $209 and Unleashed to Lifetime for $149. Prices are subject to change at any time.

There you go, you absolutely can, and they only charge $9 for the privilege of doing it later on. That seems good to me.

I'm inclined to agree, but it's really just semantic differences. If they really wanted to, they could just release a new major version upgrade every year, tie the license to that version, and still get an effective annual subscription.

Jetbrains moved away from the purchase version model and to an actual monthly/yearly subscription model a very long time ago. I don't even think you can buy their products anymore, they're literally subscription models, no longer buy versions then get updates for a year sort of thing. You either pay them and have access or don't and lose it.

I do see an advantage to tie it to a time period for the customer. If it was just tied to a major version then Unraid would have to make a decision about if a feature belongs in version 8 or version 9. Essentially locking that feature behind a paid upgrade. By making the upgrade tied to a time period they have no incentive to hold features back for the next major version.