Call me a cheapskate if you want, but I’m not a fan of premium NAS distros

Just like the PC ecosystem, the NAS landscape is teeming with cool operating systems, each adding some unique functionality to your storage server. But once you fall down the slippery slope of NAS distros, you’ll come across operating systems that ship with premium licenses. And I don’t just mean distributions that require a paid subscription to unlock all features either; there are a couple of operating systems that won’t work unless you drop some dough on a license.