It's been a few years since I used pfSense (maybe 7 or 8 years?) - when did they become so "commerical"?
(I'm not saying thats a bad thing, I really have no opinion on that, I'm just curious!)
(I'm not saying thats a bad thing, I really have no opinion on that, I'm just curious!)
I wonder what other projects I used to use have grown this much :)
Several have really deep telecommunications equipment / router vendor experience.
Plus gnn, whom, as you say is a consultant. If we're going to include him, we should include Patrick Kennedy, who has done work on libuinet for us.
My home router is basically this https://linitx.com/product/linitx-apu-2c-3nicusbrtc-pfsense-... with a ubiquity wifi AP and it works beautifully and it's rock stable.
In the long run, it doesn't matter all that much, pfSense is still 'free' as in beer, and you can still get to the sources, and forking is still possible. Only protection of the name 'pfSense' as a brand has gotten somewhat more intense.
On top of that, they are powered by their hardware sales and service subscriptions, of which the former is probably a more important source of income. It seems they either 'are' netgate, or are a subsidiary, and also partner with ADI engineering. Some hardware seems almost purpose built for pfSense, like that tiny uFW micro firewall, or the modified Turbot board (Intel) with two Gigabit Ethernet NIC's. There also seems to be a uBMC in the works, a somewhat 'universal' BMC with IPMI etc. running BSD as well, most likely pfSense-based. I suppose those would be commercially interesting but not that much consumer-oriented but more the bigger ODM's and OEM's since it requires a bit more integration. So those hardware things are a lot more 'commercial' than the software project ever was. I suppose that naturally overflows into pfSense itself.
Currently, pfSense seems to have been 'branded' as a 'community edition'. There doesn't seem to be a 'commercial edition' anywhere yet, but I can imagine a model similar to GitLab where you have a common core and a paid version with enterprise extras. It also seems to be showing the serial number or platform UUID in the web interface, I guess that's somehow going to be tied into the non-community version of pfSense to use with an activation system for the 'more-than-community' version.
I do believe that there is already at least a special version for VMWare on their 'market' or whatever it's called, and a possibly modified version that runs on the pfSense or netgate branded hardware since it needs special software support to function due to it not being simply a 'standard x86 PC'. The uFW is ARM, so a working ARM version of pfSense is out there too!
Notice: a lot of this is just observation and speculation on my part, but it might help you dig for clues on the interwibble.