Software Freedom

RealNAS is free software in the technical sense the term has had for forty years: the source is available, the licenses permit redistribution and modification, and there is no contractual layer that re-encloses what the licenses give. The project intends to keep it that way, and this page describes what that commitment means concretely.

---

License posture

RealNAS is composed of code under several free licenses, reflecting its history and its dependencies. The project respects the original terms of every inherited component and contributes new code under BSD-style licenses unless a specific inherited file requires otherwise.

FreeBSD base system

2-clause BSD. Unmodified.

OpenZFS

CDDL. Unmodified, as packaged by FreeBSD.

Samba

GPLv3. Used unmodified from the FreeBSD ports tree.

Inherited middleware

GPLv3 and LGPLv3 components, retained under their original terms. Modifications are released under the same license.

New RealNAS code

BSD-style by default, to remain consistent with the operating system it runs on.

The license texts of all of the above are reproduced in the source distribution. We do not relicense components in ways that conflict with their upstream terms.

No CLA, no rug-pull

The project does not require contributors to sign a contributor-license agreement that assigns copyright to a single entity. Contributors retain copyright on their contributions; the project distributes them under the license attached to the file. This is the same model FreeBSD itself uses.

The practical consequence: nobody can unilaterally relicense the project closed. There is no shareholder vote that can make tomorrow’s release proprietary. The contributors’ copyrights are distributed; an enclosure would require every meaningful contributor to agree. That is a much harder transaction than the press release that usually precedes a license rug-pull.

This matters most in environments where it is least negotiable: regulated industries, long-lived archives, public infrastructure, anything where a five-year procurement decision must remain operable in the seventh year. The license posture above is what makes RealNAS defensible as a long-term infrastructure choice, not just as a current-quarter convenience.

Forkable on purpose

The decoupled architecture is, among other things, a fork insurance policy. RealNAS does not patch the kernel, does not require a custom installer, and does not depend on services the project controls. A fork can pick up the source, build it on a stock FreeBSD, and continue. We hope a fork would not be necessary. We have made sure it is possible.

Operators are not customers

Operators of RealNAS are not customers of the RealNAS project. There is no account to create, no terms of service to accept, no usage that is metered, no feature that is gated. The free version of RealNAS is RealNAS. We do not produce a premium variant that artificially withholds capabilities from the free build in order to drive upgrades.

If the project ever offers paid services (commercial support contracts, signed mirror subscriptions, hosted instances), they will be additive. They will not subtract from what the free build does. The free build will continue to do its job, standalone, on hardware you own. (See the roadmap for how aspirational commercial scope is shaped.)

What “free” rules out

The commitments above mean the project will not adopt some patterns that other storage products have adopted, even when they are profitable. Specifically:

• No cloud-tethered features. Functionality in the free build does not depend on a service the project operates. If it needs the network, it needs your network, not ours.
• No telemetry-funded development. The project does not subsidize its development by selling, aggregating, or otherwise monetizing data collected from installations.
• No binary blobs in the default path. Where a feature requires a binary-only component, it is opt-in, off by default, and clearly labeled. The default install is something an operator can audit end to end.
• No mandatory accounts. A RealNAS installation that is never registered with any external service is a fully-functional installation.
• No DRM on the operator. There is no licensing daemon, no hardware-locked binary, no “activation” step that can fail.

What it does not rule out

Freedom is not the same as the absence of commerce. The project is allowed to want to be sustainable; sustainability is allowed to involve money changing hands. The discipline is in where the money comes from. Paid support, paid hosting, paid integration work, paid certified hardware, paid signed-mirror subscriptions, paid feature sponsorship: all of these are compatible with everything on this page. What they have in common is that the operator who pays nothing still gets a fully-functional system, and the operator who pays gets a service rather than a permission.