Hi all
Hot Topic at the moment on Reddit,
What do we think? Who’s going to switch away from pfSense? I am going to keep it around for as long as possible! I have it literally deployed, everywhere!
Do we have more solid details on what they are planning to do? From what I’ve read, they are definitely going to release 2.5 before all this changes. No sense in worrying right now, should be easy enough to move to OPNsense if the sky falls, but I’m certainly not to the point of running around shouting “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”. I would say that the cancellation of CentOS is of bigger consequence right now, and this problem they have said will maybe be covered under some form of limited RHEL license. I’m not really invested in CentOS right now, so I’m just going to start moving what little I have to Debian or some other Linux flavor.
Pfsense on the other hand, I’m kind of invested into with production, a small license fee would be fine with me, which is another things that was discussed in another thread and probably something they are considering. A license to run it on your own hardware, just like they have a support contract for running it on their hardware.
That’s all well and good but the fact they are closing source for future productions (If I understand correctly) well that sorta goes against the whole point of running pfSense really - it was good that it is open source!
This is a good read:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/l21c67/announcing_pfsense_plus/
I don’t have any Netgate hardware at all, I don’t think it is cost-effective enough to run a Netgate appliance so I run it on Server hardware usually as have many many spares on the shelf that can be switched out at a moments notice!
Quite how that would work I am not sure… It looks like to be able to run it on your own hardware is fine if not in Commercial/Production environment.
You can read a further update pfSense Plus and pfSense CE: Dev Insights and Direction
Seems ok for home users, personally it was a big step up from an Asus router to pfSense beyond that I’ll only need marginal functional improvements. Though like most things time will tell.
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Chris,
You are right. I forgot that this is “open sourced” so this may be another Oracle/IBM (Redhat) situation.
If they keep the price to what I can sneak through my budget at work, I’m still happy to pay. And as part of that, I want my system at home to run the same because I often develop on my home firewall to deploy on the work firewall. Just the way I have been able to build things out since I suddenly needed a vpn to home back in March when we were sent home to work. Pfsense and openVPN at both ends in a site to site just made sense to me at the time. Might do things differently if I need to reconfigure, but having my entire lab system available over the vpn sure does come in handy for me!
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Yeah I dont think cost is an issue per se, but the fact they are making it closed source is a major thing… and makes me think I don’t want that. Look at how many closed source Routers/Firewalls have backdoors in etc and are closed source! No thanks, I want to know what I am running!
I will have a look when it’s there. For deployments I do for clients we use mostly “official” netgate pfSense Hardware so upgrade would be easy.
For those open boxes / self build systems we run pfSense we will clearly stay on the standard pfsense,
I run it strictly at home. For a small fee I would gladly upgrade. I paid $50 a year for untangle@home for a couple of years. Not really interested in their hardware, but that and support pays the bills.