He stayed calm, he might have been getting criticism from some of his clients
Personally feel tom should not have made that video, perhaps the relentless barage of the trolls eventually got to him 
Mr Sheridan has motivated me to start making the move to opnsense…
Harry
… from 29.50 onwards…
In the words of Tom Lawrence - “Whatever makes you happy”
Tom isn’t telling you to NOT use OPNsense. He gave his insight on why he doesn’t use it and backs up his claims.
Hornets nest here. There is room for both.
politics, sex religion and opn vs pfsense … best avoided!!!
as this is a tech site:) i was quite interested in the specific technical replies he gave as a counter to toms points, made me rethink some things after watching toms vid … always a good thing, im sure tom wud agree
Is debate the point of these forums, or should we all espouse our preferences and move on? Don’t spoil the fun. Debating subtle differences over relatively meaningless topics is kinda fun.
I thought the guy brought up good points to counter Tom’s. One idea he got me thinking about was, if users choosing opnsense are impairing BSD (one of Tom’s main points) then so are general users just running BSD like a “normal person”. Using BSD probably would need to come with the caveat that you should give back. Otherwise you are a fee loader like opnsense purportedly is. However, this guy does point out this is not really the case.
I suspect each give give back in proportion to their means. Which if true, means this particular point might be moot. At least that is my argument.
Really the debate comes down to “what fits your needs”. If you require particular features, security, usability, etc on your firewall then use it. Cut and dry. There isn’t more to talk about. Tom made his choice and explained why he doesn’t use it and everyone else made their’s.
Don’t get into the politics of things. If you do your research and make and educated decision for your environment, then do it. Don’t listen to both sides talking smack on the other. if you are persuaded by youtube content creators to use one firewall over the other then I’d say you’re being foolish.
I wasn’t trying to get into the “smack” thing, Tom’s video/reasons for using pfSense and not OPNsense are his, and I understand getting crap from people about not doing videos on things you don’t use, which I tried to explain in that video that he doesn’t really have a use case for it. I also pointed out that he states the video is not about “why you shouldn’t”.
I simply wanted to counter some of the things that were said around security, and OPNsense contributions.
Both are great firewalls, use what you want
i felt exactly the same, initially it seemed cut and dry, opnsense kinda free loading, but the argument seems more nuanced, i’m from the uk and i think there is a real cultural difference going in here wrt to cultural diffs across the pond
the issue sheridan mentioned around pfsense running bsd 14 before it was finalized and the examples of opnsense contributions to bsd really struck me.
for me pfsense is a pure profit focused entity with a “community” department, which cud easily die if the wrong idiots take it over (redhat/vmware anyone)
wereas opnsense is a community of enthusiasts/freeloaders/profit centred company who wouldn’t have a trantram if chinese companies started illegally profiting of them
the other thing that hit me was his comments on the ovpn accelleration advantage… struck me that pfsense actully decided in a meeting to omit the code from pfsense ce, to me that says they should they should not be the only custodians of monowall
i like tom, but i think he was naive to think that his video would not be seen by uninformed people that opnsense is inferior to pfsense
hell i’d admit it … to my shame now even i was thinking the same in the back of my mind until i saw sheridans video
shame on me
I think you are mixing up your conclusion with your premise(s). We all draw our own conclusions, the premises we use to get to those conclusions are open for debate. You are right, there isn’t anything more to talk about regarding the conclusion you came up with.
Some premises are subjective like politics & religion often are, others more objective. You list security, which is arguably objective. Is one marginally better than the other? Tom lists some rather objective points in favor of pfsense that I think still stand. This dude brings up other points to attempt to counter those advantages. I think it is fun to learn about the subtle differences found by debating the premises.
As I mentioned, that was my video. I simply wanted to point out that OPNsense DO contribute to the FreeBSD community both in the sense of code commits (going back 14 years) and monitary value by sponsoring BSD events, such as EuroBSDCon, which is not just FreeBSD but all BSDs.
Netgate and pfSense also benefit from OPNsense.
Many of the things are FreeBSD 13 vs 14. I wasn’t trying to bash on Netgate either, they’re not some random company using a firewall product based off a “development” version of FreeBSD; they commit code back, and I’m sure they know what they’re doing, still MY “opinion” here was running a firewall on unsupported “beta” code is a bad idea, it’s not just Netgate committing code to the base operating system, others are too.
You’ll notice I never mentioned any of the “unethical” behaviour nor brought up or shown the git commits with devs arguing with each other, or refusing to acknowledge issues with FreeBSD since it only seemed to affect the other product, which got commited anyway (which you can find for yourself).
As I mentioned in the video, I tried to “stay out of my own head”, which is hard because there’s a few of us in here 
. I tried to stick to actual facts, which are documented and undeniable.
The OpenVPN DCO thing isn’t available in CE, yet Netgate did contribute that code back to FreeBSD 14 (that Tom noted) which was used by OPNsense. It’s open source code, why wouldn’t they? My amazement was it not being available in CE if it’s part of FreeBSD 14, and the code changes are not that hard to support it. Assuming, Netgate are focusing more on their Plus version; similar to Boot Environments, which are also a feature of FreeBSD itself; which may come to OPNsense at some stage, they’re on the roadmap.
The Intel® Multi-Buffer Crypto for IPsec Library, is part of Plus, not part of FreeBSD and may never be committed back.
I also mentioned my reluctance about this video, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else, maybe in a not so nice way; so why not me and do it properly? Also, believe me Tom was aware of this video before anyone else. It took me a week to make the decision to publish this video, knowing the controversy around the cat vs dog thing.
If you criticize someone, and have valid points it is ok, you do not have to apologize for it. You just have to be objective and do a full review, not just pick ans analyze some points of a video. Statements come BEFORE everything. After the fact it is like an apology. You can’t counter a thing with an another. You cannot give words in other peoples mouth, and countering it by doing the “same”. You cannot state I am not doing this and that, and than doing that exactly thing. Well you can do all above, but you loose credibility. Ad yes, you should made this to a separate video