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.

They probably didn't do anything illegal. They did something I don't approve of.

Since I am not one of their C suite or majority shareholders, I have no other way to express what I want and what I don't want.

The usual answer if you don't like something is take it or leave it. So I leave it. Talking about it someplace public like here, I am not trying to be demanding or entitled or anything, just documenting why I choose to leave it, or why one might choose to leave it, even if it's inconvenient.