Pfsense-tools missing from repository
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Un-authorized? WTH? Seriously hope this is not the direction the project is taking. So yeah, this would be really concerning.
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This is concerning, as I've just lobbied for a pfSense solution for a customer. I'd hate to have to start over.
That's no reason to not use pfSense! I'm pretty sure they just want to control posting of un-authorized and premature images of development versions.
Only people I see it affecting are ones eager to be cut by immature bleeding edge, and truly paranoid types who want to build their own images.
Controlling the posting of binary images of development versions is itself a questionable act in an open source project. Somewhat more alarming, there appears to be active censorship occurring here by the site admins as demonstrated by an attempt to follow the link posted above.
More practically speaking, I can't even build the current release tree without these tools. Almost everything I run, including my OpenWrt, is a custom build (for reasons that aren't really germane to this thread). This seems like a very large hammer to crack a very small nut if its aim is to prevent posting of binary images as you surmise.
Would the admins care to comment to set the record straight?
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More practically speaking, I can't even build the current release tree without these tools.
This would also hampers bug fixing badly, recall multiple recent serious issues with apinger, prominently.
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From Jeremy Porter on the dev mailing list, in response to an email query about the missing pfsense-tools repository:
We are in the middle of migrating repositories and services to new hosts and datacenters, to support our work on pfSense 2.2.
I really don't think they are going to make pfsene-tools closed source! You guys have been reading too many posts in the "NSA" thread :)
And they do have to protect the pfSense brand - even I, with absolutely no financial interest in ESF, do not want images built and publicly published with full pfSense logos etc that have real problems. New users will end up finding them accidentally in searches and will install them thinking they are good-to-go. Then they will psot on the forum and… As I understand it, FreeBSD10/pfSense2.2 in its current state is really not useable by anyone other then real dev-nerds, for development purposes only. In that case, it really is best that there not be public images available yet. People who really want to join in at this stage of development can build it all themselves or contact ESF and really make an offer to contribute their time/skills to work together with the other devs on driver issues, patches and...But it would have been nice if ESF had posted here first, letting everyone know the repository would be off-line for x time, rather than letting a thread like this develop.
I was also looking at apinger and the patches to it in pfsense-tools just to see if I could spot what might be causing the varied latency and packet loss figures that happen sometimes. -
Would the admins care to comment to set the record straight?
+1
Then, don't delete the thread.
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And they do have to protect the pfSense brand - even I, with absolutely no financial interest in ESF, do not want images built and publicly published with full pfSense logos etc that have real problems. New users will end up finding them accidentally in searches and will install them thinking they are good-to-go.
You know, when someone has such concerns for whatever reason (I personally absolutely hate such politics, from the days of Debian vs. Firefox idiocy), you provide a –without-branding or whatever similar switch with the build tools. I personally see zero need for handholding idiots. You think publishing canary/nightly builds for things like Chrome or Firefox damages their trademark? Gah, nonsense...
But it would have been nice if ESF had posted here first, letting everyone know the repository would be off-line for x time, rather than letting a thread like this develop.
I was also looking at apinger and the patches to it in pfsense-tools just to see if I could spot what might be causing the varied latency and packet loss figures that happen sometimes.I have - about a year ago - requested branching off the -dev version of pfsense-tools. The way it's done causes regressions. As is it now, it seriously hampers debugging, prevents people with legit need of building their customized 2.1.x images from doing so; and when you pull the repo altogether, you manage to upset the community as a "bonus".
But it would have been nice if ESF had posted here first, letting everyone know the repository would be off-line for x time, rather than letting a thread like this develop.
It started with the contributor license red tape. Then you go and pull the -tools repo and start wiping threads when some enthusiast guy provides his own bleeding edge images. Why, just why? Makes me wonder - what's next? All this has been badly handled, to put it mildly.
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I really don't think they are going to make pfsene-tools closed source!
They can't turn pfSense into a closed source project, simply because of the inherited BSD license.
And they do have to protect the pfSense brand - even I, with absolutely no financial interest in ESF, do not want images built and publicly published with full pfSense logos etc that have real problems. New users will end up finding them accidentally in searches and will install them thinking they are good-to-go.
You know, when someone has such concerns for whatever reason (I personally absolutely hate such politics, from the days of Debian vs. Firefox idiocy), you provide a –without-branding or whatever similar switch with the build tools. I personally see zero need for handholding idiots. You think publishing canary/nightly builds for things like Chrome or Firefox damages their trademark? Gah, nonsense...
this exactly
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Nothing for two days? Ridiculous. Wake up, guys, seriously.
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Hi,
Somebody has the /home/pfsense 2.1.1 backup ?. gzip…
I porting pfsense to the new pcengines apu motherboard and need customize the kernel.Thanks.
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I just offered volunteer ops help on the dev mailing list. This is amateurish at best.
EDIT: Some helpful responses from their ops team on the dev list. They're working on it.
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I am trying to debug something and I cannot get the pfPorts source I need… Looking for a fork
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This looks to be up-to-date with what was last on GitHub a few days ago:
https://github.com/Podilarius/pfsense-tools -
This looks to be up-to-date with what was last on GitHub a few days ago:
https://github.com/Podilarius/pfsense-toolsThanks already found that one! Got the source I needed.
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Thank you very much!.
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It started with the contributor license red tape. Then you go and pull the -tools repo and start wiping threads when some enthusiast guy provides his own bleeding edge images. Why, just why? Makes me wonder - what's next? All this has been badly handled, to put it mildly.
Seems to be a rushed / poorly handled split into a community version and a commercial version, with differences yet-to-be-defined in the feature set between the two.
This post on the devel mailing list explains a lot.
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Not really sure what to say… When you don't provide any build tools switch to remove the trademarks nonsense, you'd better not accuse people of "misappropriating the trademark". (Note: this outdated rudimentary "howto" does not count as tool. Related rebranding thread.) ::) >:(
Seriously concerned about the heading of this project!!!
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Sad to see the end coming. I had found this to be a really good project. FreeBSD 8.3 security support ends soon, so for real/audited/… installations they will want to move up to FreeBSD10. That means 2.2, and if 2.2 is just a commercial offering that means some non-ESF people had better get working on how to make a version of this thing (with another name, I guess) run nicely on FreeBSD10, and not using whatever bits of the code ESF claim they have some copyright to (I haven't looked at the detail of that - maybe it has all been published under an OpenSource license and it is just the brand that is copyright?). I had not expected to need to bother about the legal fine-print on this project - everything I had seen up to this point was friendly and co-operative.
I wonder what will be the next thing to be taken off-line without warning? This forum?
Sorry, having a brain dump here, I am not feeling happy about the way this all feels. I have happily contributed in various ways, and am happy to have done that and hopefully helped people and reduced the number of bugs... so everyone benefits. And now the ongoing project turns commercial and shuts things away - I better read the fine print of their new Individual Contributor License Agreement now - https://www.pfsense.org/ESF_Individual_Contributor_License_Agreement.pdf -
Yeah, indeed. Just after I've switched multiple projects from m0n0wall to pfSense because it felt to be more flexible… Now people can have some more fun explaining how much BSD license "rocks" - NOT!
@phil: Should not have any trouble with copyright, just the trademarks BS. (Basically, getting ESF/pfSense logos, names etc. out of the visible code output and not using ESF trademarks for marketing/shipping the product (if applicable). Basically as per the unmaintained rebranding howto.) Nice they have warned people that "T_he best way to accomplish this is to pay the developers to do it for you, because if you haven't done it before, it's extremely time consuming where we can get it done quickly"_ - and then go and complain about "misappropriating the trademark" at the same time and ignore the questions about rebranding posted at the forum. Similar attitude just rocks, wow.
Not impressed in the least… plus wondering whether the guys behind this have given at least a couple of thoughts to things like how much recommendations is the new commercial product likely to get from the abandoned p****d off community. ::)
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Don't speak too soon, there are plenty of projects running a similar business model successfully. Redhat/Fedora for example. The way I read it there will be a 2.2 community edition it just won't have some of the perks of the commercial distro. The fabled pfCenter perhaps. Anyway this is all speculation until we hear from the project leads.
As an example of how not to do it look at Smoothwall. How many Soothie users switched to pfSense after feeling abandoned? I did.Steve
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Anyway this is all speculation until we hear from the project leads.
You know, reading more of legal threats like this, I'm not really sure I do care about the project any more.
How do these non-official "clones" help the project?
The balls. Someone nukes the public repo access, goes silent, meanwhile producing some fog about HW migration and related nonsense, and then asks how do forked repo backups "help the project"? What project? "Lets get more money out of this" is not my project. And I suspect it's not a project for lots of volunteer community testers, people who contributed by filing bugs, writing patches or just been hanging out in the forums, providing unpaid support, etc. etc. etc. The forked repos help the people who need to get work done and have deadlines and do not have time to write emails to a blackhole praying for repo access. Someone shows all these people a middle finger salute and then asks how does forking help. WTH! ::)