Choice is important and we have always said to use what works best for each and everyone in the particular setting. Since 16.1, either *sense is fine if it covers all your requirements.
All we ever wanted was standard hands-off open source licensing, free access and a flexible platform to build upon. In retrospect version 15.1 and 15.7 weren't very good by today's standards - they were produced under a "restricted source" embargo which forced us to rewrite the build chain that wasn't freely available anymore 10 months before our first version came out. Will I find the contributors here are just as inflexible and petulant as I have found with pfSense? Two, I would very much like to contribute to a good OS product as highly useful as a UI router package like pf/OPNSense. Is it your contention that a different choice should be made for commercial use?
One, your article seems to describe both OPNSense and pfSense as good router software for a home router. I have two questions or you, and anyone else reading this: But all parties must be willing to listen, consider, and above all, treat each other with civility and respect. I love the debate of ideas and consider arguments over coding styles and approaches conducive to the very best results. But I have found that OS developers do not tend to take argument well. I am an extremely good developer and love open source. Didn't consider switching but I am considering it now. I discovered OPNSense a couple of months ago, by accident, when I learned it's implementation of Suricata is superior. It's just as well as I have no wish to improve their product, anymore. They appear to not be interested in my contributions, now. But we argued about one change, that I would have made, useless as it was, until he became insulting and hit me with a "do it my way or get out" attitude. Don't get me wrong, he had some points in his criticism, and I made several of the changes he requested. I put in a pull request to have the package included in the official source and got into an argument with one of the gatekeepers who appears to be a tyrant. It works well and I use it for my company routers. The latest version of pfSense did not port a package that I was using so I set out to do the port myself.
That being said, pfSense has always worked well for me. Having a vast experience in software engineering, I have found it an axiom that good, clean coding results in a good, reliable product, and that the reverse is true, as well.
However, over time, I have looked at the pfSense code and have found a lot of it to be stream of consciousness hacking and often wondered that it worked at all. Found pfSense and been using it ever since. Three years ago, tired of the terrible service from Watchguard, I went looking for an open-source router solution for my IT department. I've worked with router/firewall software for many years. I too have been a devoted user of pfSense. The next topics that I intend to write about are jail management and building additional packages on more powerful hardware. And I like to become part of the community of a project that I use and thus would love to find my place with OPNsense, too. I have a FreeBSD background and like to tinker with things. So far I have had little luck on the forums with the few posts that I made. If you're interested, please have a look here: pfSense vs. Still I would appreciate some feedback, taking my first steps in the community. However I'm a newcomer and I'm not sure that I got everything right (I end up recommending OPNsense over pfSense in the end so it cannot be that bad, eh? ). I've come to really like OPNsense and will definitly write more about it to keep spreading the word and make it more popular.
Now I've revisited this case and decided to write a little series about it (I may link the relevant parts in the howto section, too). I took a look at both operating systems, though, but soon stopped due to a lack of time. Having followed pfSense on and off for years, I was a little biased towards it when the fork happened.