No offense, I like and use PFsense and encourage my students to familiarize themselves with it.
BUT.
Changing to a live connection install is deterring me. Since when does an opensource software require a registration and account creation to use a software. This is not opensource.
I feel this will make some, including myself, start looking at other alternatives, though there is not many opensource software’s for routing and firewall software.
I understand the need to protect a companies software I.P, and that’s fine, but if its not part of a general open source release, this is suspect. Microsoft is already pushing for online accounts in next waves of Windows 11 updates.
It’s free so fork it and/or switch to something else?
There are many options that can be suitable, if you need a WebUI then your optios are fewer but on the other hand but I hardly think that has anything to do with open source. OPNsense is probably your best bet if you want something similar though.
And yes, you need to make an account for the free purchase through the store. It’s the “RedHat model”. There is actually nothing in open source licensing that makes publicly distributing binaries or packaging mandatory.
They have their own code in PfSense+ as far as I know and this isn’t free and is closed source. PfSense is still under Apache License and open source.
pfSense has fallen out of favor for a lot of people lately (shift to Pfsense+ and hiding/blocking direct download of Community edition probably being a big part of it).
OPNsense and openWRT are the usual alternatives.
OpenWrt is by far not an equal replacement though. I wouldn’t recommend it on x86 unless its a potato, in that case you’re better off running a regular distro.
Yes I am and have looked into alternatives. I probably have a skewed idea on opensource, and I accept that.
I’m probably making a bigger stink about it then I should.
However when I watched Tom Lawrence’s video on 2.8ce and it came up that this was going to be a live install, the reason and excuse given was kind of a red flag, if not made me question it more that’s all. At the same time many people are making a big stink about, not just myself.
I am old school when it comes to computers and networking. With the advent of A.I., Microshaft pushing cloud based OS with forced online account like Chrome OS, your privacy and data is at even more risk then at any point. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the majority of data breaches and identity thefts are done by the G-man, corporations like Microshaft, Google, Apple etc through 3rd party funding.
As far as I am generally aware a lot of the pfsense+ modules are hosted somewhere i know the wireguard modules as part of it were.
At work we use PfSense and pay for PfSense+ so nothing has really impacted us about downloads, they have always been kind of hidden some of their images for their appliances and things.
I have an ISO for 2.7.0 that I use to install and just update to latest versions from there. I will never sign up to download an installer, and I’m never going to use a router installer that can’t be used offline.
Pfsense is still a great piece of software, netgate on the other hand are going downhill imo.
With the bullshit of hiding the installer iso behind a storefront and now the installer not actually having the installer on it, I’m committed to replacing my pfsense instances with debian. Kinda tired of netgate. It was a good run.