And to make it even more clear what kind of people are running Netgate (pfSense), if you havent read it yet, this is the story of when users announced the fork OPNsense, how Netgate was running opnsense.com which was a mock website entirely made to shit on the OPNsense project and discredit them. I encourage you to look at it and make up your own mind about it. And guess who exactly was running that website? Some disgruntled hardcore pfSense fan, or some low level employee who went too far? No, it was the founder & CEO of Netgate. This alone should be reason enough to never use anything by Netgate, ever, wether its a free CE or paid.

Story time.

I always found it difficult to like pfSense. I’m big on UI/UX and this was before their redesign. Even after the new design I really didn’t love it. I started researching alternatives and asked in some (not /r/pfsense) subreddit about opnsense.

Some dude named htilonom shows up absolutely going off the handle about it. Was calling it a scam. He seemed disturbingly passionate about hate for an open source project so I did some digging instead of taking his words at face value. He was running a subreddit called /r/opnscam where he was doing some downright creepy dude stalking an onlyfans girl level of stalking the opnsense devs. Posting random links to forum posts by opnsense devs, making wild accusations that didn’t fit the links he was posting. Long nonsensical rants about topics like how criticizing the choice of using C or a web interface meant people wanted to “steal” code. Nobody else posted there. Was just years of this one guy talking to himself about opnsense being a scam and how the maintainers were incompetent or were somehow stealing from an open source codebase.

I always suspected it was someone who had some business ties to pfSense, if not that CEO himself.