To be clear, macOS is “just” a windowing environment built on FreeBSD, which is itself FOSS Unix-like operating system. Most anything in userland that can be built on Linux can, ostensibly, be built on Darwin.

The best description I have seen for single store franchisees is, you’ve paid a lot to give yourself a job. They are not lucrative, and in fact, are capital intensive, and often predatory.

There is a very high up front cost, and you generally do not own the real estate. This means you are locked into 30 year leases, often with complicated terms that are solely beneficial to the land owner.

Next, with regards to liquidity, if you don’t own the real estate, you often can’t get multiple business loans with a single franchise, so you must secure the loan with your personal assets, which means you will go personally bankrupt if you hit a rough patch.

Then, after dealing with the complicated business to business transactions and legal work, you still have to deal with the corporate bullshit, taxes, and supervisory duties, particularly if you do not already have a strong business partner to do this for you.

Pretty much, unless you are independently wealthy, own the real estate in a high traffic location, or already have multiple other franchises, it’s a losing venture that will kill your soul and eat every dollar you have.

MMORPGs are an easy example, where people form recognizable identities and communities in game. An extension of this would be Second Life, and somewhat more recently, VRChat.

From my understanding, the impetus was that F5 submitted a CVE for a vulnerability, for an optional, “beta” feature that can be enabled. Dounin did not think a CVE should be submitted, since he did not considered it to be “production” feature.

That said, the vulnerability is in shipping code, regardless of whether it is optional or not, so per industry coding practices, it should either be patched or removed entirely in order to resolve the issue.

TrueNAS has an OpenVPN plugin available, which is typically the recommended option.

You are trying to solve two different, but related problems, and there are discrete solutions for both.

One is a personal cloud. You need a secure place to store your shit from multiple users and devices, from multiple networks. You’ll need a mostly static IP and dyndns or your own domain, and certificates signed by a public CA/letsencrypt.

Then, you are looking for a backup application that supports rsync or sftp/scp over ssh or vpn, that is also cross compatible (Android and PC/Linux). Point this to the service above, and you are good to go.