Announcing pfSense plus

"There will be a no charge path for home and lab use, and a chargeable version for commercial use."

This sounds reasonable, even generous.

gabacho4

This looks pretty cool to me! Very curious to see what changes occur over time. For example, will the be a transition to linux as the underlying OS like TNSR? Can't wait to update my SG-5100 assuming capabilities I currently employ continue to function.

One thing @dennis_s, you all got but by the new year muscle memory issue I deal with for the first month or two. The release says "The first release of pfSense Plus will be available in February 2020..." I think you see where this is going.

Impatient

@dennis_s The main reason netgate seem's to be moving away from the community and more
into closed source.
About the same as sophos and other's have done.

gabacho4

Sorry about the typos. Can't seem to edit.

dennis_s

@impatient In no way are we moving away from the community. We will still be contributing to CE and also offering a no-charge version of pfSense plus to home users.

Impatient

@dennis_s Thank you for making it clear.

Is it done yet? Ha

dennis_s

@impatient In early February we plan to make pfSense CE 2.5 and pfSense plus 21.02 available.

JeGr

@impatient said in Announcing pfSense plus:

@dennis_s The main reason netgate seem's to be moving away from the community and more
into closed source.
About the same as sophos and other's have done.

If you think so you have completely skipped the part where it states that a) they don't go closed source and b) what big contributions they've already made and continue to make to the OSS community and the upstream projects they are using. I'd like to see such from Sophos and others. Or them to emplay developers for e.g. FreeBSD or DPDK so they can work fulltime on those things. Or how about putting hundreds of hours of development not in WG for pfSense but WG in FreeBSD so all other projects working with FreeBSD can grab that code now, too? Just sayin...

I'm inclined to feel good about this. Two reasons.

Netgate has earned some trust based on the no cost services they offered in support of remote users to meet the challenges of the pandemic. If they sold some appliances as a result of that it was well earned and well spent (see #2)
Netgate has put considerable resources into FreeBSD development. Including hiring (there is a post, somewhere here on the forum) staff dedicated to that purpose. We have all benefited from that and will continue to get that benefit regardless of the version of pfsense used.

johnpoz

OLD news ;) hehehe

Waiting for Reddit and Twitter to blow up with the "told you so" posts - they are getting rid of the free versions ;)

I see the non readers already making nonsense statements

I'm assuming this means:

    pfSense+ is Linux-based

    pfSense CE will remain BSD-based

serbus

Hello!

chargeable version for commercial use

When will pricing info be available for Pfsense+ on 3rd party hardware?

Thanks!

John

gabacho4

@serbus did you even read the blog post? Answer is there.

@serbus I've not seen any information concerning pricing. It's going to be Netgate HW and Cloud service only initially, June time frame for 3rd party as best I can tell, so they have some time to determine that.

@gabacho4 I think he's asking about commercial use. It's a valid question.

gabacho4

@jwj yeha sorry there. I'll eat some crow. I thought I had seen a mention about pricing. I evidently need to read the blog post better.

@gabacho4 :) I did go back and re-read the blog and the FAQ myself just in case I needed to eat some crow... It's all good!

dennis_s

@serbus Pricing has not been set, but when it is finalized we will announce via our normal channels and most likely a blog.

Longreen

@dennis_s will the no charge version for home and lab use be "crippled" in any way compared to commercial version ? ( ie max bandwidth supported on throughout etc) or less features ?

dennis_s

@longreen No...Full-featured version.

Jeremy11one

I think it's important for everyone to know about these 2 things from the FAQ page:

***Q: So there are no more new releases from the project?
A: That is really up to how the project progresses itself, separate and distinct from Netgate... If the community chooses to progress feature set, testing, documentation, and release packaging, there will obviously be progression beyond Release 2.5.

Q: Is pfSense Plus open source?
A: No. pfSense Plus is closed source.

One of the big benefits of pfSense was that it is open source. Even though the upgrade to pfSense Plus is expected to be free for home users, I'm torn about whether to "upgrade" to the newer closed source version or stay with the open source CE version.