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The original was posted on /r/vyos by /u/beamerblvd on 2024-12-30 01:51:07+00:00.

So, first, let’s recap the timeline, roughly:

  • Vyatta was founded as open source firewall software in 2005. I actually met the founders at Ohio Linux in Columbus, OH in 2005. I’ve been using it in one form or another since then for my home lab.
  • In this period, I contributed documentation improvements, bug reports, and one or two patch files with my bug reports. All record of that was lost when Bugzilla was shut down, but today there’s code in VyOS that was written by me.
  • Vyatta went closed-source.
  • The last public open source change to Vyatta was forked and became VyOS, a new open source firewall software.
  • I made more contributions through Bugzilla and then Phabricator. I also submitted a few pull requests once they switched to that, which were eventually closed in favor of larger refactors by maintainers that included some of my code. I was fine with that—I wanted what was best for the project, not me.
  • VyOS stopped making binaries available to the public. You had to buy a subscription, be an active contributor, or donate to the foundation to get binaries. That’s fine. I did not speak up. I had no problem paying a $100 donation to the foundation to get an updated binary for home lab purposes. Well worth it.
  • VyOS ended the foundation donation program. Unfortunate. Even had they replaced it with a “home lab” subscription level at a reasonable price, I would have happily paid it, but no. “But you can build it yourself.” Fine, I said. They even made it easy with Docker builds. So I built it myself.
  • VyOS ended the ability to build releases yourself by removing the source code from GitHub once released. Now VyOS is closed-source software, following in the footsteps of Vyatta. The only way to use it for your home lab anymore is rolling releases … but I will not use rolling releases. My home lab may not be mission critical to the world, but it is to me. I can’t afford thousands of dollars a year for LTS releases, but I also cannot afford having my home lab go down completely because a rolling release borked it.

So, what can we do about it? Well, let’s look at the GPL for a minute. After all, VyOS is claiming they’re still “open source” because they’re sticking to the letter of the GPL. (They are not open source by any reasonable standard, but that’s a separate discussion.) So let’s stick to the letter of the GPL as well. What does the GPL say?

  • VyOS (the company) can charge someone a fee to get the VyOS (software) source code and/or binaries from them.
  • VyOS (the company) cannot require someone to pay a fee to get the source code and/or binaries from someone else.

So it seems to me the solution is simple, it’s just the bootstrapping that’s more difficult. We need two things:

  1. Initial access to the tagged LTS source code and binaries when they’re released
  2. Somewhere to host an archive of the LTS source code and binaries

I’m more than happy to contribute my part by paying for the hosting myself. If anyone wants to mirror it, even better, we can set something up to share the load. But I’m capable of providing Thing #2 myself.

What I don’t have the ability to provide is Thing #1. (Well, technically, I can provide a 1.3.3 ISO, and any releases from before 1.4.0 I could archive from GitHub. But I don’t have access to 1.4.1 LTS.) The way I see it, we have two options, with Option #1 being easier than Option #2:

  1. Someone (contributor, subscriber, whatever) who has an active subscription to download everything into the archive each time there’s an LTS release, starting with 1.4.1.
  2. A community-funded subscription via donations by home labbers who want the latest LTS.

So … What am I missing? Who wants to help? I’ve seen suggestions thrown around of forking VyOS (again, since it’s already a fork of Vyatta), and while I would support that, that would be a massive ($$ and time) community effort. And maybe we can achieve that someday, but what I’m proposing today is substantially less effort and will last as long as VyOS continues under the GPL (which, by the course they’re taking, may not be much longer).