I have to say that I agree with everything that you wrote. I am no stranger
and to the one-sided expectation of many (perhaps even most) users.
message, and I'm glad to find that I was reading too much into those words.
so.
Post by Moshe KatzMaybe I'm reading too much into points 1 (second paragraph) and 4 of
your message, but it sounds somewhat hostile to the old
use-your-own-hardware selling point that brought me into the pfSense
community ten years ago in the first place.
Moshe,
Thanks for your kind words. I appreciate your reaching out. I think that
perhaps you are over-reading my response.
Use-your-own hardware (if you want) is still a key point of pfSense, and
it's not changing, even though I get challenged frequently on same both
inside and outside the company.
I've literally had people (outside the company) challenge me during the
past 24 hours that there is "no barrier to entry" for people entering the
market to sell appliances based on pfSense software (typically on Amazon or
eBay).
This is truth.
We carry on anyway.
Personally, I think pfSense has gotten a lot better during the past
several years as we've been able to bring dedicated professional staff to
bear on the process of keeping up to date with our upstream project(s),
rather than lagging by several years. All the changes to the toolchain to
support this remain open source.
Case in point: 2.4 snapshots will begin shortly, based on FreeBSD 11,
which is not yet in release candidate form. MPD and captive portal don't
work, but these will be fixed before 2.4-release. The captive portal work
will serve to decrease our technical debt, due to the elimination of
several patches found in pfSense that will never be upstreamed, and are not
up to our standards of quality. 2.4 will also bring the ARM architecture
to pfSense. We've also moved to bsdinstall, which means that ZFS is an
option during install. Moving from PBI to pkg-ng as part of 2.3 enabled
this work. This move included a huge improvement in the build tools to be a
lot more like those found in FreeBSD. Work in this area continues.
Past efforts to improve both FreeBSD and pfSense include bringing AES-GCM
to IPsec. Work continues on making the stack faster and better, see our
paper, Measurement and Improvement of a software based IPsec implementation
to be given at Eurobsdcon next month.
https://2016.eurobsdcon.org/speakers/ (this effort is a pre-requisite to
making QAT work at speed.)
The entire FreeBSD community (including various forks of pfSense) benefits
from these efforts, just as the entire pfSense community benefits both from
these efforts as well as those of outside collaborators like BBCan117
(pfblockerNG) or Denny Page (dpinger, bringing the NUT package back to
2.3+) or Bill Meeks (Snort and Suricatta) or Phil Davis (space does not
allow me to begin to enumerate Phil's contributions) or even Kill
Bill/doktornotor. I hesitate mentioning these because I have left many
others out, and I do not mean to slight their efforts by not mentioning
them.
All of it, every single piece, is under a liberal open source license.
But it remains true that there would not be a project but for the core
developers and core contributors. We preferentially employ FreeBSD
committers to work on pfSense. This has always been true. Running the
project takes funds.
- Donations don't work, and we ask that anyone who wants to donate to
pfSense instead donate to the FreeBSD Foundation.
- Support does not scale.
- Appliance sales do.
I am not blocking BYOH, nor have I made any plans to do so. I'm not
hostile to it at all, Moshe.
This said, people selling appliances based on pfSense *who do not
otherwise contribute to pfSense* (or worse, who work against pfSense), are
not part of the solution.
Applianceshop/Deciso, and every one of their "opnsense" partners still
also offer pfSense on the same appliances. None of them contribute to
pfSense, all are willing to see it destroyed. I do not endorse or support
these companies and individuals.
Any number of parties on eBay and Amazon (and elsewhere) sell pfSense
appliances, but none of them contribute to pfSense or FreeBSD. I don't
block these, though I do insist that they correctly use our trademarks.
That said, I do not endorse or support these parties, as they do not
participate in the project or upstream, while freely availing themselves of
our efforts.
Companies as large as VMware, Cisco and Avaya have forks or components of
pfSense as part of their product set. None of them contribute to pfSense or
FreeBSD. We are approached several times per week by companies large and
small, almost always with a one-way deal.
In every healthy relationship there is an exchange of value where each
party gets something out of the exchange, even if it is relatively small.
This can be a deliberate exchange, or it can be embedded in social
interaction and conversation.
Value may be a perception of benefit, rather than something material. It
may or may not be quantifiable and it may be highly valued or of limited
value. It may also be unconsciously rather than consciously assessed.
A critical aspect of value exchange is that each side is content with what
they are getting relative to what they are giving. The underlying principle
that makes this work is that of barter, where people have a surfeit of some
things (and thus value them less), and exchange them for things they want
or need (which they value more).
A common social value exchange involves some combination of information,
affirming relationship and soothing of troubles. The classic retail and
business value exchange is money for goods and services.
Open source is no different, there are sill value exchanges that must
exist. All sides must be content with the exchange.
I look forward to your response.
Jim
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