Reclaiming Software Freedom in the Infrastructure Era
An Open Letter from Ian Evans, CEO of the Karios Foundation
To the Open Source and BSD Communities,
We are witnessing a systemic crisis in the technology industry. Over the past several years, the foundational software that powers our digital world has been systematically enclosed. Licensing agreements have been rewritten overnight, community projects have been abandoned or commercialized, and enterprises have been trapped under predatory pricing models and forced migrations.
Open source was built to defend against this exact vulnerability. Yet, too often, “open source” is used as bait-a marketing campaign designed to build a developer community before pulling the rug and locking features behind a proprietary corporate paywall.
The Karios Foundation was founded to offer a different path – one built on engineering integrity, true licensing freedom, and radical transparency.
Our vehicle for this change is Karios BSD. When choosing a baseline for our platform, the decision was immediate. FreeBSD represents the absolute pinnacle of operating system stability, network performance, and clean, copyleft-free licensing. By pairing the robust virtualization capabilities of the Bhyve hypervisor with modern ZFS storage and lightweight local orchestration, we have created a standalone platform that delivers reliable performance without compromising on open-source values.
But we know that code is only half the equation. Trust is the other.
The open-source community is rightfully skeptical of corporate involvement. To earn your trust, we must be absolutely transparent about our business model:
- Karios BSD is, and will always remain, 100% free and open source under a permissive BSD license. It is not a trial version. It is not feature-throttled. It is a fully featured, independent standalone hypervisor. It exists to provide enthusiasts, developers, and researchers with a sovereign alternative they can hack on, modify, and run forever.
- We offer Paid Support for Karios BSD, but we do not pollute the community. For organizations that love the simplicity and speed of Karios BSD but require professional engineering assurance on their standalone nodes, we offer dedicated, paid support and professional services. However, Karios does not staff a corporate support desk on community forums. If you choose the free open-source tier, support is strictly peer-to-peer and driven by the community itself.
- Karios Core is a separate operating system model, not a premium BSD upgrade. We do not believe in hiding core hypervisor features behind paywalls. Instead, to support organizations that need to scale rapidly and secure complex workloads across multiple sites and regions, we built Karios Core. Core is an entirely separate product and OS model engineered from the ground up for clustered deployments spanning from small 3-node environments up to massive-scale fleet orchestration (1,000+ nodes) and advanced AI/ML architectures. It introduces specialized enterprise layers-such as centralized SDN/VPCs, scale-out Ceph storage clusters, automated VMware migration tools, and air-gapped multi-tenancy – that are architecturally irrelevant to a standalone host.
By keeping these two paths distinct, we ensure that Karios BSD remains a vibrant, uncompromised, and independent playground. We do not expect your trust immediately; we intend to earn it through our code, our contributions, and our actions.
In partnership,
Ian Evans
Chief Executive Officer, Karios Foundation