Good to see existing licenses will be grandfathered in, would be lots of uproar if that wasn't the case.
Also not surprising with how they have been growing and performing, just means probably won't be my default rec when asked how to make a NAS/server
Yeah, but I've been promised that so many times before it's just empty words to me now.
In fact just this week IFTTT "forgot" I was grandfathered into my "pay what you want" plan and "upgraded" me to their more expensive plan. Never trust grandfathered plans.
I was just searching around for others mentioning the change with IFTTT. Did you reach out to them about this? I've got an email from September 2020 saying "Set your price, forever. You spoke, we listened. No more confusion on the length of IFTTT Pro pricing. Set your price before October 7th and we’ll honor it, forever."
My OpenMediaVault is on a grandfathered plan from 2007 and still kicking
WTF?! Subscription based bullshit is cancer
It makes sense from the business’s perspective - they want a reliable way to keep funding development.
A flat fee made sense in the days when they “finished” software and then sold physical media in stores. They did the work. They’re done. They set a price and sold it in stores.
But now we’re in this weird hybrid scenario that I hate. I expect security updates for something I “bought” (especially if it’s something connected to the internet), and I understand developers need to get paid to do that. But at the same time, I just want the software I bought. I don’t really want to keep paying over and over because the developer wants to keep adding in features that weren’t there when I bought it.
So buy Unraid and keep it off the Internet. That's the solution here. Like you said. Devs need to be paid.
I'm not so sure that's what this is...at least at this time. The lower tiers according to the article are still a perpetual license but the support/updates will be an optional extra after 1 year. Current customers won't be effected and they have a tier that completely avoids this.
I'm not thrilled by it, but in comparison Fusion360 went from 70 a month to 85 a month without any real reason and this doesn't seem like the same can of bullshit.
It's not a subscription... Yet. The nice thing is that you can just decide not to pay and you won't lose access or anything. You just won't get active development either.
Which I want to say sounds fair - but a lot of companies start with this premise and then it gets handed over to some MBA who decides the most long-term loyal customers are not being squeezed enough. Even just this week I recommended unraid to someone. Now though...
I’m totally OK with this, but having 2 pro licenses I may be biased.
It’s no different from other vendors that offer a year of upgrades with a license and you need to pay afterwards.
As long as it never moves to a “pay periodically or your entire license becomes inactive” (like Adobe), I have no issue with it.
They need to have a gentle way to handle upgrades after the included “timeframe” that also isn’t just “buy a new license if you decide to skip updating for a period of time” for whatever reason. If you stop updating for hardware or personal reasons for a few years, getting back up to date should still be competitive vs buying a new license.
UnRAID is absolutely worth it. Definitely the best computing investment I’ve made in the last 2 decades.
Glad to be grandfathered in, but now it's time to take a serious look at alternatives. Do people still like FreeNAS? I currently rely on the use of mixed drive sizes (5x 4TB + 2x16TB) so it would be really annoying to switch to a RAID5 solution, but I should probably have enough time to let these smaller drives die/be replaced before switching.
Tried it after unRAID. Hated it. Erased it.
I'll be watching too. I'll be tentatively moving forward, but if they start demanding an actual subscription, even so much as $5/year, I'll be moving to something else. Not even that that'd be unreasonable in terms of pricing, it's the principal of companies getting tired of honoring their own word.
So far, this change is fine with me, but we'll see what the next change would be.
Yeah, it's an early warning sign for sure. Hope it's a false positive.
I'm running both Unraid and Truenas (freenas rebranded). Truenas is absolutely my preferred choice IF you either buy all your drives in one go, or can expand drives in batches. The performance difference between Unraid and truenas is pretty large. Which is especially noticeable when using a 2.5g+ connection.
You do, however lose the ability to just throw in a bunch of random drives like Unraid. This is the primary reason one of my systems is running it.
The app/VM experience is better on Unraid, but Truenas (scale) isn't too far behind. For the average plexarr stack both work just fine.
Now I'm even happier that I moved to proxmox.
I never understood why people use unraid, mostly because I never understood the "parity" features, or honestly between you and me the lack of proper parity. But I have a Synology, so I can't talk (price wise) and I have raid 5 everywhere so parity is a joke here too :p
You can use drives with different sizes and, if array fails, all the files are readable. Good luck with RAID5 and stripping.
For me, I use unraid because I have a consistent need to continue upgrade disks and I really need to be able to do it adhoc because I can't afford to replace 24 disks at a time and don't want to fight with multiple zfs pools. I was actually planning to go to a new unraid server with 36 disks and have a second pro license. I just finished removing all 8tb disks and will be replacing the 10 and 12tb with 22tb now.
Now I might have to use truenas or something as an intermediate so I can reuse my existing license.
Ugh...
