Few days ago I wrote about pfsense vs openbsd and twitted about it. As you can see, it triggered a flamewar, which was never my intention. The reason I continued that flamewar (and one more with the same person on other thread) was the I had nothing better to do, to be honest. I was away from home with my laptop, and I was tired of programming and administration projects. I’ve noticed that OpenBSD community hardly said anything. I don’t understand why anyone would be intimidated with the fact that one person twitted about not using some piece of software. Having that attitude could never attract people. Linux user group I’m member of had few men like that, and we ended up pushing away people who wanted to be part of our group and contribute. Even if people are wrong, they should be let to make mistake, if they decided to try something out.

On the other hand, the arguments presented were funny. For example, one of the arguments was that PF on FreeBSD 11 is faster than the one on OpenBSD 5.6. While this may or may not be true, the fact is that FreeBSD 11 is not released, making it bleeding edge version. At the same time, OpenBSD 5.7 is the current stable version, not 5.6. And who said that the speed of firewall was even important, compared to ease of use and integration with the rest of the system. As a matter of fact, firewall is just one small part of the system, and it’s not even the reason why I made the switch.

All in all, pfSense community, or at least two gentlemen that were the loudest, are one more reason why I will not use their product. It’s not my anger or any other emotion. If I learned anything from open source projects is that community is everything. Sad for pfSense!