Updated October 30 2023 Licence Changes to pfSense Plus

20 thoughts on “Updated October 30 2023 Licence Changes to pfSense Plus”

• Freebsd is dated. Is there a pfsense / opnsense bases on Debian or some other system?

• Thank you for the great info brother!

• $129/year is entirely too expensive for Home usage. They need to add a non-subscription, no support tier for around $20-40 that needs to be renewed upon every major upgrade (2.7=>2.8 for example.)

• Switching to Sophos is probably the WORST option of all.

• Hi Tom thanks for the updates and I'm glad Netgate decided on the $129 option as it is affordable for Home Lab users and as such, I've just purchased a 2 year subscription to TAC Lite. Although I might not use many of the Plus features, you're right in that if no one supports Netgate then FreeBSD is going to suffer. Thanks Negate too for listening to the user base on this one and you have a new happy customer as a result!

• As always, internet loves the drama. Ideally all the knowledge should be free but I really like your comment "how you live in a real world".

  Tom, I love how down to earth and rational you are. Jason also seems to be an awesome person to work with. I am so happy you guys have created this environment when you can make a living while also keeping your integrity. Wish you all the best, pfsimps.

• You will own nothing and you will be happy. That is the meme of corporations. Everything is now a service and never a good,.

• "we reacted to quickly" …. yea mistakes are human,… however you cant do that as a firewall manufacturer
  also zero day warning is unprecedented. this is not about license anymore, its lost trust forever. the hole fiasco was unprofessional and downright at the very least stupid.
  to much to be a company to rely on for core software.
  all in all this is a problem on so many levels.

• They claimed on Reddit that Protecli had been selling hardware preloaded with pfSense Plus, all the users said they'd never received a unit with it pre-loaded. Then the people from Protecli weighed in and said they've never done that, they have only ever obtained pfSense+ licenses for testing purposes to make sure their hardware works with it since it's a common operating system people install on their units.

  Netgate are just liars, plain and simple.

• I would consider buying NetGate, but i must wait till they make NGF features working without "crafting," etc. Maybe someday 😉 i know its possible, but it's the 3rd package's without official support. With that being said, it requires lots of tunings. Where on paid devices its much better.

• Sorry Tom, but "they made mistakes" is just an excuse, a word salad of insincerity. They pulled back because of the crap ton of push back. They could have simply introduced the $129 charge at a later date. They could have given the Home+Lab Plus users three months to either move to CE, move to something else or take up the $129 charge at a date set in the future. Abruptly "cutting Home+Lab" off in the manner they did is something other companies have done in the past and like Netgate they have come to regret the action. This was just an ill thought out quick money grab that went wrong, which led to a pile of bad feeling and push back. The damage is done and many will move on and I pretty sure there are IT professionals, like myself, that will look at Netgate with suspicion in the future.

• Why just not migrate to the OPNSense solution anyway? I mean, I understand that the programmers have to earn money to survive, but if there are messy license solutions why just not to migrate to ones that are better or at least transparent?

• Question : Do they plan to bring a plus install iso out? Not the CE to Plus upgrade bla bla.

• Only Plus feature I care about is boot environments and can live without those too… It is easy enough to re-install pfsense if you have a recent backup of your config anyways. So that $129,= for me will never happen. Also there is Opensense which is fine for home lab usage.

• OpnSense the way to go. literally 0 reason to stick to pfSense. what a garbage company

• You're right, you're not secretly working for Netgate. It's out in the open.
  Joking, kind of

• Too late, gone with OPNsense, and working better than PFSense

• 0:10: 🔑 This livestream discusses the changes in pfSense licensing and addresses concerns from viewers.
  5:43: 👍 The YouTuber acknowledges the mistake made in a previous video and discusses the community's reaction.
  10:53: 💰 There is a discount code available for $29 off the purchase price of a product until November 2023.
  15:53: 🔒 The speaker has concerns about the security of open sense compared to pfSense.
  21:11: 🔒 The video discusses concerns about the use of an old, unsupported version of OpenSSL.
  26:40: 🔒 Vios is a stable version of a firewall that requires a license costing $8,000 per year.
  32:23: 🔥 The speaker addresses issues with code commits, forum presence, and customization of the UDM.
  38:03: 📚 The speaker discusses the current state of BSD compared to its past and mentions his involvement in puppeting newer versions of BSD.
  43:35: 📝 Porting the FreeBSD stack at Netflix to Linux would not be a monumental task, but hiring a team that understands Linux would be.
  48:50: 🔒 The video discusses the features and use cases of pfSense and Microtik routers, highlighting their popularity among wireless ISPs.
  54:32: 🔒 The speaker discusses issues with intellectual property theft and mentions a funny plan to address it.
  1:00:15: 🔒 The efficacy of Snort and Sraak Cotta as basic protection measures in a home user situation is discussed.
  1:05:09: 🤔 The speaker discusses HP's acquisition strategy and its impact on the acquired companies.
  Recap by Tammy AI

• Time to switch to OPNsense.

  PFSense seems to neglect the CE version, maybe it has changed recently but when I set up my router in May or so this year, the PFSense plus version was a kernel version newer than the CE version. As my hardware was pretty new, the old kernel did not fully support my hardware and I had performance issues until upgrading to Plus.

• I switched back to CE, no issues, it works fine for my use case

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