can use without paying anything and no subscriptions 
it was so free that pfsense got mad with protectli for bundling with their hardware. guess they crossed a line 
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So free as in āno cost,ā not free as in āfreedom.ā
Edit: Iām not rms. I donāt believe that free software is a moral imperative, nor that close-source software is immoral. But I do believe thereās value in truly open-source software, and as a result I think it needs to be clear when software is and isnāt F/OSS.
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Now that hits the nail on the head right there.
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Exactly. I do not want to start a licensing debate though.
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fair enough, you are absolutely right. myself i wasnāt really thinking deep on this topic so that didnāt cross my mind 
i was simply just saying it doesnāt have any cost to download and start using as a normal user (or any subscription models most of us hate), that is all. so thatās my only input on that xd.
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Yeah, thatās why I asked for a clarification 
Free can mean a lot in English, although IMHO the interpretation as gratis is a bit flawed.
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m0n0wall! Memories! Untangle even, was great back in the day! Would collapse under a lot of traffic even with filters turned off, but was great tool for protecting and controlling employeeās!
Iāve avoided getting sucked into the political battle of PFSense vs OPN. Iāve run PFSense in various ways, including for work a past job (online poker site that was ranked 3rd in terms of players - heck a DDoS took down our ISP before my pfsense even broke a sweat!) for about almost 20 years now?
It works for me and everything I use it for, While I do not run SNORT or anything major, I guess I just know it will work for me, set it and forget it when it is deployed. Currently my home PFSense just runs on a little HP SFF with a lower profile Intel x520 , I go direct from our ISPās fiber converter to my pfsense (1Gb copper), but want to try and go direct from their fiber into pfsense, but it may not allow me pending on the termination box they are usingā¦
So for now, PFSense it is, until they do something like a VMware/Broadcom and screw over the community more that made them relevant at all!
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i never touched untangle because of their price model (not calling them out, but to each their own). for all i know it might be amazing. but pfsense cost nothing to download and use, works good and stable. so to me, that is a good deal, hence why i never bother to try something like untangle
in that sense, the choices in that category is, pfsense or opnsense. They are even in that aspect. Canāt go wrong with either 
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Dan, apologies for the question, but whatās ārmsā in this context? Iāve searched but didnāt find a fit. I donāt want to consign this to one more old-fartās failure to keep upā¦
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Not Root-Mean-Square, but Richard M. Stallman.
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i didnāt get it either. maybe iām just not one of the cool kids. hard to keep up with the lingo these days 
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Itās essentially a reference to the GPL and FSF
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Thanks, dan - more research required on my part nowā¦
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I run opnsense, due to the behaviour of netgate entirely. Multiple bad things over the course of a few years, funny enough before I decided on either.
OPNSense IMO is the superior product and I suspect it will continue to slowly grow.
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yeah i thought how netgate behaved by slighting opnsense with the domain fiasco was pretty lame and immature. surprising for a company to behave that way. canāt blame others for thinking bad about them.
that said i still use pfsense ^^; i try to avoid the politics when possible. for myself, privacy, features, price, and bargains is what i prioritize more. theyād have to cross some really bad stuff to cross my redlines to switch to another router os
from usability standpoint it works as before, though i noted community edition lacked the boot environment feature which i thought was useful but missing from CE. but that is about it. rest works fine as before.
i noticed that linus had switched to opnsense. not sure about now, but he had made a video a bout it.
skip to the end of the video. they went opsense from pfsense 
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Netgate also announced that you MUST have some kind of processor of some kind or they wonāt allow encryption or they wonāt support you going forward after 2021? Something like that, despite that being totally possible on opnsense.
The community lost it at them and they pulled back the announcement.
Plus the insulting opnsense multiple times to the point of fraudulent claims, then theyāve done something recently with their free builds? Making them worse or pulling some kind of lite homelab license which was perpetual (sorry Iām not sure of the specifics, Iām almost def a bit off here)
Oh and they stole the opnsense domain and subreddit initially etc.
Then they offered wireguard in the kernel? or something and paid a contractor who was bad and did bodgy code? I dunno
A TOTAL mess in the end and horrible reputation. I canāt imagine why anyone would ever consider them anymore to be honest.
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Linus of LTT? His doing something is usually a pretty good reason not to do it. But I havenāt watched his stuff since his ābuilding a pfSense routerā video where he drilled a hole through a motherboard to mount it and was surprised it didnāt work any more.
Yeah, that was AES-NI. That didnāt bother me muchāwhen they made the announcement, any proc Intel had made in the past ten years had it; I wasnāt bothered by the fact that you couldnāt use an old Pentium /// with pfSense.
The loss of the free license for pfSense+, their BS reasons for creating it in the first place, and the Wireguard fiasco are all covered in the thread on the old forum.
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When I started, I used pfSense. It worked alright for 6 months until I started using more features. In particular, DHCP DNS registration. As it turns out, when combined with DNS block list, it had a side effect of rebooting Unbound everytime a host registers with DHCP and causes DNS lookups to get āhung upā for 30 seconds or more.
Digging around unearthed a whole bunch of users experiencing the same issue dating back all the way to 2017 with no end in sight and the pfSense devs didnāt sound like they were interested in ever fixing it since it was allegedly an āUnbound bugā. You can read more about it here Frequent unbound restarts | Netgate Forum. The last post in the thread was me.
At this point, I decided I had enough of it and switched to OPNsense. Despite having the same exact settings, I now have perfectly functioning DHCP DNS registration and DNSBL functioning flawlessly. I think itās been running almost a year since I switched flawlessly, so clearly pfSense devs were talking out of their ass, so Iām now firmly in OPNsense camp.
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He actually provides some compelling reasons. Notably OPN being on later versions of FreeBSD with better hardware support, and demonstrates some config converters.
Interesting thing is my pfsense installs are virtualā¦ solves the boot environment issue ;), but I could easily just suck it and see 
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Ran across this video the other day about an OPNsense application I hadnāt previously anticipated, that of a transparent filtering bridge:
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