pfSense is going closed source and not free for commercial use

[guest27277]

NetGate announced on 1/21/2021 that they will be shifting most of their focus from pfSense CE (open source and free for all) to pfSense Plus (closed source and not free for commercial use).  They say they will continue to support CE with vulnerability fixes and some updates, but future progress of CE will depend on the community doing it.

Many thousands of pfSense users may be looking at OPNsense over the next several months.  If you agree after reading their FAQ and forum discussion, you may want to prepare with a page comparing the pfSense and OPNsense projects, and writing some migration instructions.

This may be the time when your predictions about the direction of pfSense will be proven correct, and your work to protect open source will be widely recognized and appreciated.

FAQ:
https://www.netgate.com/solutions/pfsense/plus-faq.html

Forum discussion:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/160097/announcing-pfsense-plus?_=1611256029730

[mihak]

a question from someone that never used pfSense: how hard would it be to create a converter of pfSense config to OPNSense config? I feel there will be considerable amount of defectors that will evaluate OPNSense - and we should make it easy for them...

[securityconscious]

a question from someone that never used pfSense: how hard would it be to create a converter of pfSense config to OPNSense config? I feel there will be considerable amount of defectors that will evaluate OPNSense - and we should make it easy for them...

There will be a no charge path for home and lab use, more info here under question "Can I get pfSense Plus for my own hardware or virtual machine?": https://www.netgate.com/solutions/pfsense/plus-faq.html

So I think people used to it will stick to it.

[franco]

Flush out the non-paying users and keep the paying ones, maybe gain a few.

Remember the non-announcement of AESNI requirement?

So here we go again. :)


Cheers,
Franco

[franco]

PS: The recurring talking point about making closed source feel reasonable because of sizeable, generous upstream contributions tries to divert from the fact that it's not open source anymore; attempting to make this choice seem good when both things are separate choices and have no strict correlation between them.

[hescominsoon]

Flush out the non-paying users and keep the paying ones, maybe gain a few.

Remember the non-announcement of AESNI requirement?

So here we go again. :)


Cheers,
Franco

I got nervouse when they switched the license to Apache...I figure the writing was on the wall then....

[Supermule]

A closed soure firewall is never a good thing...

Like windows firewall. You have no idea that its sends all traffic to the US for analysis.

[hescominsoon]

Flush out the non-paying users and keep the paying ones, maybe gain a few.

Remember the non-announcement of AESNI requirement?

So here we go again. :)


Cheers,
Franco

yes but Netgate has said they are effectively abandoning the free version.  I would NOT depl90y a product that is not going to be actively maintained by the company...

[pankaj]

I used pfSense for 3 years and made the switch to OPNSense early 2021. Here are my observations:

- The support on pfSense community forum is awesome, since they run a commercial product they likely have paid staff dedicated to responding to queries.
- The documentation (collateral, guides, tutorials etc) for pfSense is way better than OPNSense, it took me several months to figure our "monit" on my own  :(
- The firewall rules for OPNSense are somewhat counter-intuitive if you've just migrated from pfSense
- The initial few weeks on OPNSense were hard but the more I used OPNSense, I started liking it but I will admit that the initial learning curve on OPNSense was quiet steep.

Here are few things I really like about OPNSense compared to pfSense:
   - Once you get a hang of OPNSense firewall rules, I find it more efficient than than pfSense
   - Really like that all the modules have logs separated out instead of one common log in pfSense which was too cluttered to sort
   - Not sure why but I have really started liking UI of OPNSense, the menu ribbon & tabs are lot more intuitive than it was for pfSense ( I never used the paid version of pfSense so I could be wrong here)
   - Certain services like automated backups using Google Drive API or Nextcloud seems better supported on OPNSense

But having said that the commercial applications (especially corporate client) need additional features like support, compliance, liability waiver etc that a true opensource will never be able to fulfill.

Redhat going the Centos way did not deter Linux but rather enhanced its standing so wishing pfSense team all the best for coming years  8)

[mimugmail]

Everyone is happily invited to contribute to the documentation via GitHub. Its not that hard :)