General questions

[dewitt]

Hi,

I work @ IT department of a medium company. My boss gave me a list of projects to quick scan. Yours is one of them. As such I have some initial general questions.

• Saw the BSDnow episode. The admin of this forum was in it. I take it admin is not a developer, which leads me to: who are your developers? How many of them? Fulltime/parttime? Formal education in unix/FreeBSD?
• It seems the company behind this project is a web shop. What is the business model of this project?
• If I am correct - and please do correct me if I'm wrong - yours is a fork of pfSense. Do all the pfSense packages work on your project? In case of problems with those, who will do support for the packages?
• What/where is your roadmap?
• When do you expect your product to be stable, for release in production of a medium company?
• Do you sell paid support? 24/7, different time zones? How many support people? Phone or email? Price/contract forms?

Thanks,

[jschellevis]

• Saw the BSDnow episode. The admin of this forum was in it. I take it admin is not a developer, which leads me to: who are your developers? How many of them? Fulltime/parttime? Formal education in unix/FreeBSD?
• It seems the company behind this project is a web shop. What is the business model of this project?
• If I am correct - and please do correct me if I'm wrong - yours is a fork of pfSense. Do all the pfSense packages work on your project? In case of problems with those, who will do support for the packages?
• What/where is your roadmap?
• When do you expect your product to be stable, for release in production of a medium company?
• Do you sell paid support? 24/7, different time zones? How many support people? Phone or email? Price/contract forms?

• You can find more information about the project on our website opnsense.org/about/about-opnsense/ including members of the core team. As you can see I am also one of the core developers.
• The project is founded by Deciso, a Dutch manufacturer of security appliances, more information can be found here:www.deciso.com. It is a community project, lots of people and other companies are contributing in different ways.
• The projected started as a fork from pfSense, but it is by no means the same. We do not offer or support the package system of pfSense. Our system uses pkgng for upgrades and in the future we will also use this mechanism for addons/packages. There is also a post in this forum about package support, see forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=13.0
• Our current Roadmap can be found here: opnsense.org/about/road-map/.
• We already have customers who are using it in production. However we are still refactoring and restructuring code therefore we consider the next major release (15.7) to be stable for all intended purposes.
• More information on commercial support can be found here opnsense.org/support-overview/commercial-support/. For other inquiries I would advice to contact Deciso or one of the listed partners directly.

Good luck with your quick scan. I would also advice you to take a look at github so you can see how our project is structured and licensed.

[dewitt]

Thank you for your reply: appreciated.

• You can find more information about the project on our website opnsense.org/about/about-opnsense/ including members of the core team. As you can see I am also one of the core developers.
• The project is founded by Deciso, a Dutch manufacturer of security appliances, more information can be found here:www.deciso.com. It is a community project, lots of people and other companies are contributing in different ways.
• The projected started as a fork from pfSense, but it is by no means the same. We do not offer or support the package system of pfSense. Our system uses pkgng for upgrades and in the future we will also use this mechanism for addons/packages. There is also a post in this forum about package support, see forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=13.0
• Our current Roadmap can be found here: opnsense.org/about/road-map/.
• We already have customers who are using it in production. However we are still refactoring and restructuring code therefore we consider the next major release (15.7) to be stable for all intended purposes.
• More information on commercial support can be found here opnsense.org/support-overview/commercial-support/. For other inquiries I would advice to contact Deciso or one of the listed partners directly.

Good luck with your quick scan. I would also advice you to take a look at github so you can see how our project is structured and licensed.

1. I don't see any resumes of the three team members. I have to guess all skills. I could understand if you would want to send resumes via PM, but then: please do.
4. The roadmap contains a lot of 'general code fix up'. I can't do very much with that 
6. So your hourly rates are between 168-93 USD, depending on volume. This is top of the market rates, in this time (we have UCLA IT graduates working our systems for 75 USD). Those could be fair if you are top of the market developers. But for that I would need to see re: point 1. Also: am I correct your support is 9-5 Dutch times, on working days? No geo zones?

I hope you understand: we are looking at this high level at a company first, before we even dive into the product any further.

[jschellevis]

We have a very highly skilled team of professionals, but this forum is not the place to discuss commercial offerings. This forum is intended to help out community members and users.

I would be happy to discuss business opportunities as wel as any support requirements you have, just contact us directly as I suggested before.

As for the roadmap, we will update that frequently. The next major release in july includes important features such as IDS/IPS and Proxy, but most importantly it we are structuring the development. New parts are integrated/build with the Model View Controller concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model–view–controller). Structured code is not just 'general code fix up' but an important part of the design process.

Also take a look at our github sources that will show you the skills and the progress we make.

[chemlud]

Hi dewitt!

Interesting thread. Could you provide some other names on your bosses list to be checked? For which time zone would you need 24/7 support?

Kind regards

chemlud

[jschellevis]

That is great thing about a true open source project, so many people can help you.
Welcome Chemlud!

[chemlud]

Hi jschellevis!

Unfortunately I'm only a dumb user, not a programmer. Actually I have some of the older Applianceshop boxed (with pfSense, CF cards...). Will start testing opnsense on an old notebook to see, how things work out...

I use the box with  cron, email report, service watchdog and snort. Besides VPN is important, I currently use openVPN, but there seems to be some space for improvement, considering bettercrypto.org (although I am by far not an expert on this).

Will follow the project and see how thing develop!

Kind regard

chemlud

[jschellevis]

Hi Chemlud,

We can use all the help we can get. Testing and user experience is as important as developers who help coding.
Thanks for considering our project. Enjoy testing and if you have questions or run into issues just let us know.

Cheers,

Jos