Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

My biggest problem is security updates.

The “x years of upgrades” model is okay when it’s for an app, where you can just keep using it with the old feature set and no harm is done.

But Unraid isn’t an app, it’s a whole operating system.

With this new licensing model, over time we will see many people sticking with old versions because they dont want to pay to renew - and then what happens when critical security vulnerabilities are found?

The question was already asked on the Unraid forum thread, and the answer from them on whether they would provide security updates for non-latest versions was basically “we don’t know” - due to how much effort they would need to spend to individually fix all those old versions, and the team size it would require.

It’s going to be a nightmare.

Any user who cares about good security practice is effectively going to be forced to pay to renew, because the alternative will be to leave yourself potentially vulnerable.

Yup, my comment mentions the parity disk :)

Good to emphasise that a bit more though.

The clue with Unraid is in the name. The goal was all about having a fileserver with many of the benefits of RAID, but without actually using RAID.

For this purpose, Fuse is a virtual filesystem which brings together files from multiple physical disks into a single view.

Each disk in an Unraid system just uses a normal single-disk filesystem on the disk itself, and Unraid distributes new files to whichever disk has space, yet to the user they are presented as a single volume (you can also see raw disk contents and manually move data between disks if you want to - the fused view and raw views are just different mounts in the filesystem)

This is how Unraid allows for easily adding new drives of any size without a rebuild, but still allows for failure of a single disk by having a parity disk - as long as the parity is at least as large as the biggest data disk.

Unraid have also now added ZFS zpool capability and as a user you have the choice over which sort of array you want - Unraid or ZFS.

Unraid is absolutely not targeted at enterprise where a full RAID makes more sense. It’s targeted at home-lab type users, where the ease of operation and ability to expand over time are selling points.

Been using unraid for a couple of years now also, and really enjoying it.

Previously I was using ESXi and OMV, but I like how complete Unraid feels as a solution in itself.

I like how Unraid has integrated support for spinning up VMs and docker containers, with UI integration for those things.

I also like how Unraid’s fuse filesystem lets me build an array from disks of mismatched capacities, and arbitrarily expand it. I’m running two servers so I can mirror data for backup, and it was much more cost effective that I could keep some of the disks I already had rather than buy all-new.