Hi Ashley,

I think this has been raised before and based on experience I don't think that will change. State that is wasn't designed for enterprise is just a way to try to make it look better or as an excuse to scary people. What they should concern is to tell people the obvious, that the Community version is not supported other than by Community forums.

If you have concerns about this I would strongly advise you to swap to Openindiana + napp-it. Version 1.0 of napp-it looks much better than previous versions and the performance and the features you get are pretty much the same plus you don't have ever to worry about the 18TB limit if that become be an issue for you one day. Good thing is that you just need to export and import the ZFS pool back which helps the transition a lot which is easy anyway.

thanks, but the real issue here is that there is a significant difference between prohibiting production use and not providing official support to CE users.

Sure we can use Openindiana etc but this is still built on illumos of which Nexenta is one of the main sponsors.

For switching we'll probably look at something not based on illumos to avoid any future potential changes to EULA by the likes of Nexenta.

I think the way Openindiana is being managed has been fine. The maintainer (let's call like this) is not a Nexenta employee anymore and being a much wider project and used by other companies I don't think they would ever put such type of thing on the license. IllumOS itself is not a commercial product and doesn't have commercial interests. I believe you would be pretty safe in that regards.

Hi Ashley.

Nexenta can't change the EULA for illumos.

If you are concerned look at the illumos FAQ: http://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/illumos+FAQs

I'm running version 3.1.2, when I installed Nexentastor the EULA didn't say anything about restricting Commercial use. The current version that I have has an EULA from October 18th 2010 which doesn't restrict Commercial usage so I won't be upgrading.

This is a real kick in the face, all of our virtual servers are using the Nexentastor server for their storage, to move to something else now would be a monumental undertaking, Had I been aware the EULA was going to change I would not have even bothered testing Nexentastor being that we are a not for profit organisation and can't afford huge licensing fees.

Looks like I will need to make the switch to OpenIndiana, or wait until NAS4Free becomes stable, FreeNAS is still a no go due to the outdated ZFS version.

just to add to the confusion over the EULA..
If I browse to the Nexenta.com site to the EULAs, I find this page;
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/resources/eula

The EULA for the community edition is listed as;
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/eula-nexenta

This differs to the EULA from the NexentaStor.org site and doesn't have any information about commercial usage restrictions.

Please can someone from Nexenta confirm what the EULA actually is for the community edition and clarify the commercial usage of the product.

I'd suggest someone from Nexenta also updates; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexenta
As at the moment it says; "A community edition is available free of charge for users with less than 18 terabyte of used disk space" when it's not free for commercial use.

bump... Can anyone from Nexenta please comment on this. The link that is creating the ambiguity is; http://www.nexentastor.org/projects/site/wiki/CommunityEdition

@Ashley Watson:

It's been discussed for almost a year now: http://nexentastor.org/boards/1/topics/2985

Right now, Nexenta's stance on CE production use is this: you are allowed to use up to 18TB as a hobbiest or home use production. But you are not allowed to do "business" production with CE. (which is absurd, because the line between personal and business production usage models is as blurred as ever now)

I wrote Linda Kateley a private email begging Nexenta to reconsider CE's EULA prohibiting production use, but no one from Nexenta gave me any feedback. I even argued that FreeNAS, NAS4Free, Napp-it all have free production license on a single node without even 18TB limits. But I don't think Nexenta cares. CE is more like FCE edition(Fubar the Community Edition) in Nexenta's eyes.

In the end, Nexenta is just another open core business that doesn't have any clue how open source works. Thievery is at the core business model of the top management. Unfortunately, I would bet heavily against the survival of a "perl presentation layer company" in today's double dip environment.

While I agree with some of your arguments about a "difficult" relationship with open core compare to open source I'd like to point out that Nexenta can be definitely given credit for their contribution in illumos. That's currently where they give back to the open source community. They don't just take illumos, put their storage magic into it and take that sealed to their sole advantage Yes: illumos' CDDL would allow that, it is a more permissive than GPLv2/3. illumos community and companies behind them see themselves closer towards the BSD mentality. (Think of the numerous BSD vs. GPL flame wars, it's a somehow fundamentally diverging understanding of "open source" and the liberties of making things closed once again partially)

Still:

• The CE EULA definitely keeps being itch that interested people irritate because there would be possibilities to make things easier while still protecting their interests to make enterprise users buy their product
• If feel Nexenta legal seems to be accessible via the community channels that currently exist. They don't seem to feel that it's itching enough be fixed somehow until now.

@Mat Simon Looking back at history, it is more accurate to say that Nexenta got more from forking OpenSolaris than it did contributing to illumos. Let me be a little bit more specific. It is more than a year and half since D'Amore declared "we boot", and not even OpenIndiana or Illumian can say they have a stable build and provide security updates. Illumian is still stuck at 1.0, and looking more like an abandoned stepchild than a fully supported illumos distribution, and OpenIndiana is stuck with constant alpha builds with 151a5. Seriously, when is a stable build with patching system going to come out? I see illumos as a three way tug war between Nexenta, OpenIndiana, and Joyent, that the effort is too fragmented right now for any serious production use, and already Nexenta is forking the fork by having its own branch.

The point I want to bring out is that ZFS wasn't designed to have a 18TB limit or non-production use limit. It was open source. The problem I have with most Dtrace GUI guys on top of ZFS is that they think the DTrace GUI addition to underlying ZFS is a durable competitive advantage, when in fact it is just a scripted presentation layer. (Sorry for the blunt description of what NexentaStor really is) Open core players always overestimate their portion of contribution as a percentage of the overall package, that they forget who they really are. They take more than they contribute back.

And the distribution of wealth is disproportional in an open core business model, that the player who contributes the last 1% usually gets paid full, where as the people who pulled most of the work(Bonwick and his team) gets almost 0 payment from NexentaStor enterprise licensing. Hence it is a matter of ethics.

It definitely has been a while before a stable build is delivered, but there is a lot of activity going on in illumos.

I don't see it as a tug of war since they are all working on different initiatives: Joyent: cloud os, Nexenta: storage sever, OI: distribution. Most importantly though they are all contributing the core updates back into illumos.

Don't forget there are other companies like Delphix with major contributions like async zfs destroy, feature flags and zfs send resume. There are actually quite a few companies building their business around the illumos core.

If Nexenta drops the ball with how it engages with the community that is their decision -- IMNSHO restricting CE to non-production workloads is a mistake.

It is an exciting time to be involved with illumos !!

yep. fun times! Derek@Nexenta - can you please try and get official clarification of the EULA from Nexenta perspective.

yikes. This is disturbing. Since I work at an educational non-profit institution, our setting is most definitely not "commercial" - However I suppose we would be considered "production". I was looking at trying out Nexenta CE for awhile, since our storage needs currently fall well under the 18T limit.

For edu's who have traditionally been bastions of open source, having to purchase a full "commercial" license out of the gate is definitely a barrier to entry, as is putting a bunch of work in implementing a solution which may be too pricey for us in the future.

Sigh. I guess I should look at Illumos distros.

Section 2.2 of the EULA (version 2.1, August 28, 2012) specifically says: "The Community Edition may ONLY be used for educational, academic and other non-commercial purposes expressly excluding any commercial usage."

Derek Glover wrote:

Section 2.2 of the EULA (version 2.1, August 28, 2012) specifically says: "The Community Edition may ONLY be used for educational, academic and other non-commercial purposes expressly excluding any commercial usage."

This just gets more and more confusing..

2.2 If You have acquired a Community Edition license, the total amount of RAW Storage Space is limited as specified on the Site and is subject to change without notice. The Community Edition may ONLY be used for educational, academic and other non-commercial purposes expressly excluding any commercial usage.

So educational institutes can use it in their production environment or in a lab environment?

The Trial Edition licenses may ONLY be used for the sole purposes of evaluating the suitability of the Product for licensing of the Enterprise Edition for a fee. If You have obtained the Product under discounted educational pricing, You are only permitted to use the Product for educational and academic purposes only and expressly excluding any commercial purposes.

So if I buy an enterprise license with an education discount I can only use it in the same way I can use Community edition? and again does that mean just in a lab environment or as a NAS/SAN on our production network?

Wait, so if the eula says I can have 4TB of data, so I install nexentastor and get up to 3.5TB and then you guys change the eula to say 3TB, I'm suddenly in violation of the eula? Or is there a grandfather clause I'm not seeing?

Derek?

Any chance you can answer my (IMO) perfectly reasonable question? This is kinda important (I would think), but you don't seem to be interested in answering :(

I'll have to try out an upgrade myself and see, does it make you agree to any new EULA before allowing upgrade?

If the EULA fit the bill on the install, and doesn't cause an 'Accept before Upgrade', I don't see how you would be forced to align to the new one without proper notice.

I think I was unclear. I'm not talking about doing an install, I'm talking about the wording that says 'the total amount of RAW Storage Space is limited as specified on the Site and is subject to change without notice.' Hence, my question about whether that wording applies to existing installations. It certainly isn't clear from the wording :(

Existing installations should be held to the EULA revision they agreed to.

Hard to go changing the online one, and try to affect people retroactively without proper notice.

Okay, thanks. You see why the wording (looks) a little scary? :)

Yes, trying to get a nailed down response on your question.

Migrating between these systems isn't that hard, install os, zpool import.. Yeah, it's not REALLY that simple, but it's not REALLY that hard either for many setups - I know some have a far more complex setup but if you design your storage as a keep it simple setup, as much as possible, then migrating is fairly quick.

Also with zfs send and incremental snapshots if you have a spare server or two you can juggle between os with very little downtime (not zero).

Going with community / open source is always going to have more risks than buying full Nexenta, but I feel some of these comments are unfair..