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by Godel_unicode 1917 days ago
I'm not sure that over 10 years later is "as soon as they could". NetGate has made a huge number of open source releases, and while they have not held exactly to the platonic ideal of open source (literally every bit on the disc comes from an open repo) I think we can all agree that the vast majority of the existing CE code remains open. I also think that they get a lot of shade because some of their developers have been some of the loudest jerks in open source.

In my opinion, at the moment we have Schrodinger's open source: in the box there's a future pfSense CE which is well-maintained but differentiated from their commercial offering of pfSense Plus, and there's a pfSense CE which languishes from a lack of new features and slowly accrues an ever-larger trail of closed-won't-fix bugs.

At this time, which future will develop is anyone's guess; I suspect even NetGate don't really know. Even if they're planning on effectively abandoning CE in place, a backlash in the community could cause that to reverse.

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> At this time, which future will develop is anyone's guess; I suspect even NetGate don't really know. Even if they're planning on effectively abandoning CE in place, a backlash in the community could cause that to reverse.

It seems like a certainty that users will shift over to the free version of pfSense Plus for the eventual performance advantages, if not for the REST API alone, and then pfSense CE will slowly wither. We'll see, but I really think you're being overly optimistic entertaining an alternative scenario :)

A possibility, sure. Not a very likely one, but don't let me keep you from your doom-and-gloom :)