OPNsense: Beyond the fork

[jschellevis]

Here we are, ~40 releases and time to give an update.

We set out to create a thriving community and today we have thousands of people enjoying OPNsense.

The high degree of participation from the ever-growing community has surprised even us.

We are excited to see users helping each other on the forum and sharing ideas.

A special thanks goes to all of you who helped out with testing, fixing issues and realizing new features such as the transparent proxy, the hardenedBSD improvements and the tremendous help we get with the language packs.

With over 5000 commits and several million lines of code the project now has it own identity and makes different choices than its parent project. To name a few we have adopted the Phalcon MVC framework for all new features, have a pkgng based firmware upgrade system – that has proven to work very well – and modernized the user interface.

With the release of 15.7 we have a production ready stable version that has proven itself in lots of different scenario’s from protecting office networks to a datacenter solution proving virtual private networking for its customers.

And the great thing is that our parent project, pfSense® has taken over some of our best practices and listened to all of you by bringing back the source repository as of 21st of August, 2015.

Their users benefit from us too, and that is how it should be with open source, where we share whatever we can.

That they do not have a true open source license yet and stick to their ESF 6 clause license makes the sharing one way at this point. Hopefully the success of our project encourages them to follow us and open up their license as well.

However you look at it, a new area has begun for open source security and together we will achieve our goal “to make OPNsense the most widely used open source security platform” – faster than anyone imagined.

Jos Schellevis
OPNsense core team