Will Netgate publicly commit to supporting free and open source via pfSense Community Edition?

Finger79

I've been a vocal supporter of pfSense for a decade. I proudly wear the pfSense t-shirts in my personal life and proudly wear the pfSense polo shirt at work. For the record, Netgate's concern about slimy 3rd parties illegally misusing pfSense Plus is valid, and I don't support that.

I have longstanding anxiety that CE will die, either abruptly or passively (via a lack of material updates and support). The release of 2.7.0 helped assuage my anxiety. For the record, I'm okay with a very slow release cycle. I'm okay with a slow introduction of new features and functionality. I just want the continuation of security patches and point releases to somewhat follow the commercial pfSense Plus versions.

There is likely a substantial community of young adults in our 20s and 30s and future IT professionals/network engineers who use CE at home but then pitch pfSense Plus and TAC at work. For our homes and families, we want something a bit less entry-level than DD-WRT, OpenWrt, and consumer grade software and hardware, and pfSense has been a darn near perfect fit.

Will Netgate publicly commit to a pfSense CE that:

Is free of charge for home/personal/non-commercial use; and
Is free and open source?

Additionally, there is also a large population of vocal home/lab users who DO want to support Netgate monetarily but cannot justify $399/year for the current lowest license fee.

Some ideas:

pfSense Plus Home/Lab perpetual license: something like $99 (perhaps more); and/or
pfSense Plus Home/Lab subscription license: something like $49/year

Can also have holiday sales, discount codes, etc.

For the record, I am not in favor of jumping ship to other offerings. But if Netgate ever makes a future business decision to terminate the free Community Edition, it will understandably alienate many thousands of your biggest cheerleaders.

Can Netgate commit publicly and in writing to open source and to reasonable availability of the Community Edition?

Thank you so much for your time. Perhaps we can brainstorm ways to prevent black/grey market dealers from illegally abusing the pfSense Plus license.

Edited to Add: The Roadmap on Redmine shows pfSense CE 2.8.0 as well as CE-Next, so I hope this is much ado about nothing. Still worth some official forward-looking statements from Netgate to give many of us some peace of mind.