Goodbye, and thanks for the fish!

After more than 15 years of working with and providing add-ons for the ReadyNAS storage systems I decided to pull the plug. It wasn’t and still isn’t an easy decision but with the latest changes that came with ReadyNAS OS 6.10.8 Netgear made it more than clear that they no longer really care about the ReadyNAS product line.

Instead of providing the much needed significant update to the base operating system the ReadyNAS uses (Debian Linux) ReadyNAS OS 6.10.8 again just provided the absolute minimum needed to allow users to use their perfectly working storage boxes with modern browsers and modern operating systems.

Call me naive but for a couple of years now I was hoping that Netgear after effectively abandoning the ReadyNAS product line might take the bold approach and open source the remaining parts of ReadyNAS OS, thereby allowing the community to take over, swap out the OS and keep using perfectly working hardware for some years to come. Well, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Now I’ve finally reached my personal tipping point, where it became too much of a burden trying to backport all the libraries and tools needed for modern add-ons while at the same time making sure not to break the essential parts that remain closed source like readynasd.

So I decided to stop all development of add-ons for the ReadyNAS systems.

What’s next

That said, I won’t shut down the repositories just yet. They’ll stay available for the forseeable future. If time permits I will also try to upload all of the code I produced over the years to GitHub (links will follow).

Since I still own a couple of ReadyNAS boxes I won’t bring those to the junk yard just yet. Instead I’m researching a way to convert them into OpenMediaVault boxes without loss of data and ideally with an automatic migration of users, shares and other settings. If you’re interested or even want to participate in this new journey, you may want to watch this space for updated links to GitHub as well.

Have fun with your ReadyNAS as long as it lasts.

-Stefan