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by seany 1923 days ago
Netgate is weirdly hostile to a lot of opensource stuff, which should be strange given what all their tech is built on top of. This has been going on for years. (see opnsense etc)
3 comments

They've recently forked their open and closed source products, so a lot of people have been migrating to OPNSense. I've been using it for a couple months now and recommend it.
Same. I didn't really care for open-source-ness or for the anti-OPNsense smear campaigns as much, but when they announced they were EOLing the product I used I jumped ship to OPNsense too.

It does everything my pfSense install did and then some. Eg DNS blocking and IP blocking are built-in instead of needing a pfblockerng-style plugin.

The only thing I've found worth complaining about is the accordion sidebar UI thing makes it hard to middle-click-open new browser tabs, because it's not obvious which entries in the sidebar are actual pages and which are fake hyperlinks that just expand the accordion submenu.

Netgate funds a lot of FreeBSD work, and employs FreeBSD committers. I certainly wouldn't describe them as hostile to open source.
It seems clear to me this is a case of passionate coders with different personalities struggling with the difficult work of human communication in a world with limited resources and time.

No one has to be the bad guy here or end up hostile to open source.

They can be a touch snotty towards developers who aren't freebsd committees.
I think every project has people like that. I can think of some open source projects which are led by people with attitude problems.
Real subtle, Colin.
I mean, Linus has openly acknowledged that he has behaved unprofessionally in the emails he sends to people who are trying to contribute. There isn't anything secret here.
LOL, my first thought was that you were talking about Theo.
Perhaps entitled is the right word then.
Maybe. It's not necessarily without reason -- if you make a lot of contributions and they are generally very well received, it's quite sensible to anticipate that further contributions will be equally well received and to be surprised if they're not.

This was made worse by the unfortunate timing -- the final release candidate is just 3 days away. Any other time, we would have gone slower, had more discussion, et cetera; unfortunately this turned into an emergency.

I didn't know that. That's kind of awesome.
I was about to buy a netgate router when I read the background of everything here on HN.

Basically, all the opensource claims don't amount to a hill of beans, because you cannot compile pfsense yourself, even for their hardware.

(I'm sure someone could come up with the link)

The firewall should be the ONE place where this would be critical. You have to run their binary.

I also think it phones home.