Right as I start building a firewall monitoring and configurations service…things change drastically. Luckily, as a smaller company I am able to be quite agile in responding. I had heard rumblings of something a couple of weeks ago…now those rumblings have been mostly confirmed. At least this means the beginning of another research project now that I have completed my storage appliance research.
All you have to do is read the FAQ here:
https://www.netgate.com/solutions/pfsense/plus-faq.html
In essence the BSD, open source PFSense will continue to be a project hosted by Netgate. Netgate has said though that the majority of the work after PFSense 2.5 is going to shift to PFSense plus..which is a closed source, paid product. Negate needs revenue to survive. I understand this…but Red Hat has shown that paying for support for Open Source software is a profitable business. Right now PFSense Plus will only be available in Netgate cloud instances and their own branded appliances. I do not know what the pricing for Plus is..as Netgate has not announced pricing. Netgate has decided they are going to effectively abandon the free PFSense in the future. For now Netgate says they will curate and help with security updates..but that’s about it…which usually once a commercial company goes closed source they are going to leave the open source project entirely. I will continue using PFSense for now…but I will be evaluating OPNSense very very soon. Right now I have two firewalls I am building for clients and those firewalls will be brought online. I will be looking for alternatives to convert those(and future) clients to in the near future to make sure they do not have any disruption in service or security.