Open Infrastructure Starts Here
True Open Infrastructure. No Artificial Barriers. No Vendor Lock-In. Open by Design.
As enterprise infrastructure becomes increasingly constrained by changing licensing models, rising costs, and proprietary ecosystems, the Karios Foundation exists to preserve a different path: one built on openness, transparency, and community stewardship.
Karios BSD is a high-performance virtualization and container host operating system that is free to use, modify, distribute, and deploy without subscription requirements, licensing restrictions, or artificial feature limitations. Whether powering a home lab, university, enterprise, or public sector deployment, the platform remains fully accessible to everyone.
The Karios Foundation is committed to ensuring that modern infrastructure technology remains open, independent, and community-driven for future generations.
Our Commitments
Absolute Transparency
Every line of Karios BSD source code is developed in public and hosted in openly accessible repositories. We do not maintain private “community editions,” delayed feature branches, or closed development models. The software available to the community is the software we build together.
Stewardship of FreeBSD and Bhyve
The Foundation believes successful open-source projects require active investment, not simply consumption. We support dedicated engineering efforts that contribute improvements directly upstream to the FreeBSD and Bhyve communities, helping strengthen the broader ecosystem upon which Karios BSD is built.
Educational and Research Advocacy
Innovation begins with unrestricted access. Karios BSD is made available at zero cost with its full feature set to students, educators, universities, research institutions, laboratories, makers, and self-hosted environments around the world. We believe education should never be limited by licensing costs.
Sovereign Infrastructure
Every organization, regardless of size or budget, should have access to secure and capable virtualization technology without dependence on proprietary licensing models. The Foundation is committed to preserving simple, powerful, single-host virtualization as a permanent, community-owned capability that anyone can deploy, study, modify, and improve.
Upstream-First Development
Wherever practical, improvements developed through the Karios Foundation are contributed back to upstream open-source projects. By strengthening the ecosystem rather than fragmenting it, we help ensure the long-term health, security, and sustainability of the technologies that power modern infrastructure.
A Foundation for the Future
We believe that virtualization, containers, and the infrastructure technologies that underpin modern computing should remain open, transparent, and accessible to everyone—not only today, but for decades to come. Through engineering investment, community collaboration, and unwavering commitment to open-source principles, the Karios Foundation exists to ensure that future remains available to all.