There is a reason there's a growing push of people leaving pfSense for OPNsense.
Remember when they bought their competitor's domain and put up this? http://web.archive.org/web/20160314132836/http:/www.opnsense...
Just checked:
r/opnsense is a private community
The moderators of r/opnsense have set this community to private.
Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions.The response then from Netgate was very much on-brand, they indeed have a history of colorful PR. And of course they are ultimately responsible for things they put their name on.
But this also highlights how difficult participating in open source can be.
Even the areas of it that have been "open" have largely hidden, incomplete and non-buildable for the longest.
It's really a mixed bag. They pay for a bit of development but throw their weight around in ways that are harmful to the project.
Netgate seems to want to brag about their contributions (despite the fact they don't even show up on the foundation page) while also somehow not taking any responsibility for when they screw up.
https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...
I dunno, I was shopping around for network appliances and I considered a netgate box until I saw how Netgate representatives conduct themselves on their reddit. Participating in open source doesn't need to be difficult; a modicum of humility is all it ought to take but the Netgate folks seem arrogant an abrasive pretty much as their default position.
Gave my money to someone else instead.
I mean, I see what you're saying, but I can't 100% agree with this. As a textbook example, I still remember way back when Apple was getting started with KHTML and what would eventually become WebCore and WebKit, and they got quite a lot of heat for a while early on for just doing big fat block code dumps without following project procedures and such. "Contributions welcome" is true for anyone, but there is an implicit (and often these days explicit for larger projects) "...as long as you follow our code standards, communicate, put in the basic effort to do a professional job, etc". Contributions don't have to be perfect but there needs to be some meat there or it's just a waste of everyone's time. Even for a big corp doing big work, just "throwing code over the fence" so to speak often is not appreciated.
Netgate hired him, so they were ultimately responsible. They apparently did a very, very poor job of both checking on him and supporting him, which is on them. They didn't see about coordinating with the actual guy who created the entire thing. They didn't do a basic sanity check of what he'd finished before trying to have it pushed right to main, and they were aggressive about deploying a security product that was really really shoddy and in context quite dangerous right out to the general public. And then they were complete dicks about even relatively low-key efforts to try to fix it with as much face saved all around, too much even.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't actually seem like a great example of how corps can participate productively. Nor do I honestly think it "highlights how difficult participating in open source can be". Can't just expect unlimited gratitude purely for volunteering something useless/dangerous.
Yes, but Netgate's TSNR is based on Linux. So it seems they will be pivoting to Linux, or at least have less emphasis on FreeBSD.
My guess is that going forward there will be less money and participation going to FreeBSD from Netgate. Whether that is a good thing or bad thing depends on your perspective.
Our commitment to FreeBSD continues unabated.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-landlord-hell-defends-te...
Just in case there wasn't enough evidence that the people at Netgate are not good human beings.