Regardless the estimated quality of the new thing, there is a point and a value in penalizing the old thing when it fails to adhere to principles.

One must have principles onesself to see this as imortant though.

A lot of people use words like "practical" or "pragmatic" to avoid inconvenience.

I've already been using zVault for a year which is a fork of the last truenas core, but it never got any further updates and it's about to become impossible to run up to date software in jails on the old host. The pkg repos that support the host version are about to go eol and the binaries will be gone. So I've already gone through the "what if this doesn't go anywhere?"

My point: It's a pain but I won't relieve that pain by running trunas scale.

I'd rather try switching to xigmanas or dump the whole concept of the front end and just run plain freebsd and learn a few commands to manage storage and file services directly and a maybe a seperate dedicated jail manager like bastille. At least that way I can never be stuck in this position again where I can't update my own software because someone else stopped updating their software.

I totally understand why you’ve made those choices. It just might be worth questioning how much of your own time these principles are worth.

This entire time you’ve been swapping between NAS distros fiddling with your NAS box my TrueNAS SCALE installation has required approximately zero of my time and has never lost the ability to be updated.

To me, the NAS aspect of my homelab is the least interesting and is something I just want to install once and forget about.

Did they violate some principles of the open source ethos? I guess so; they deprecated build scripts, but the source code of the product is still available and GPLv3. The practical impact to the end user is effectively zero. I’m not even sure I would personally need the source code to be available when it comes to a NAS solution — I did consider unraid as a potential alternative before settling on TrueNAS.