For some days it looked as if the FreeNAS project was dying a slow and uncertain death. Olivier, who originally founded FreeNAS, announced that FreeNAS will continue as a FreeBSD based system, whilst Volker will set up and develop a Debian-based NAS system called OpenMediaVault.
Olivier will return to the FreeNAS project and Volker will contribute to FreeNAS as well.
FreeNAS needs some big modification for removing its present limitation (one of the biggest is the non support of easly users add-ons).
We think that a full-rewriting of the FreeNAS base is needed. From this idea, we will take 2 differents paths:
Volker will create a new project called “‘OpenMediaVault” based on a GNU/Linux using all its experience acquired with all its nights and week-ends spent to improve FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He still continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share its time with this 2 projects).
And, a great surprise: iXsystems, a company specialized in professional FreeBSD offers to take FreeNAS under their wings as an open source community driven project. This mean that they will involve their professionals FreeBSD developers to FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit to do a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.
Personally, I come back to actively work in FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (that is “production ready” for ZFS).
If you used nexenta you would get debian with zfs.
OpenMediaVault will be based on Debian Lenny for the moment (maybe on Squeeze later) because Volker is familiar with Debian due to his job over the last year.
nexenta is opensolaris based not debian
some people at lwn pointed out that if you base the system on debian squeeze/kfreebsd you can get a freebsd kernel (zfs) with the debian packages infrastructure… maybe this could be a good idea in the long term and will allow a better interaction between the two projects!
what do you think about?