FreeBSD-Based m0n0wall Firewall/Network OS Announces The End

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD-Based m0n0wall Firewall/Network OS Announces The End

For anyone that in the past decade has looked for an embedded firewall/network operating system to build your own router or network device has likely encountered m0n0wall. While m0n0wall has been popular over the years and is powered by FreeBSD, the lead developer of m0n0wall has tossed in the towel after twelve years in development...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=m0n0wall-Game-Over

[NotMine999]

Sorry To See It Go

Phoronix: FreeBSD-Based m0n0wall Firewall/Network OS Announces The End

For anyone that in the past decade has looked for an embedded firewall/network operating system to build your own router or network device has likely encountered m0n0wall. While m0n0wall has been popular over the years and is powered by FreeBSD, the lead developer of m0n0wall has tossed in the towel after twelve years in development...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...wall-Game-Over

I have never been a "fan" of FreeBSD based solutions for my own use, but I do admire the work done by the m0n0wall team.

The m0n0wall team made the difficult task of building a firewall "easier" and their product always looked "very clean" to me.

[BradN]

To be honest for me as a Linux user and who thinks copy-left licenses are Gold i never understand why these people
use anything else than: IPCop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCop

BSD license based products only works for companies like Sony with products like: PlayStation4

Any smaller groups and individuals are the loser in this big game if they choose anything else than Linux+Copy-left licenses.

And now the hard reality kicked M0n0wall out of business.... fine next time ask me first and then you choose not to give away all the code for big companies like Sony who just make it closed source and let you die in the Desert without water.

I think this might be an oversimplification but I'm sure it does apply in some cases. But then I think of a case where the open source development is proceeding faster than the versions made closed source - the closed source ones would be stuck chasing the open source version and it could turn into a situation where all the interesting stuff is happening in open source and closed source is just trying to keep their custom patch sets compatible, or they fork entirely and get left behind.

PS4 model works because they intend to do no chasing at all - what they put in is what goes in and that's the end of it. Developers know what they can expect from the system at the beginning and there is no need to scrounge for new featues.

When open source development is slow it can take a different outcome where open source gets left behind because the closed stuff is nicer to use (more polished, more features, etc). You lose too many users, lose too many bug testers, but I think importantly, you lose the high end users (or maybe never had them to begin with). The ones that know what the project needs to elevate itself because they had to go somewhere else to get it.

Anyway, I think in some ways the BSD license is an admission that sometimes closed development is more effective at pushing for that "last mile" in development. But when the open source development is working really well, there's not much reason for a company to take it closed source, or when they do, it's in a less threatening way (PS4 as example).

[ssokolow]

I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for me, personally.

On the one hand, I've wanted to switch my Soekris box to something more featureful for a while. On the other hand, there's a reason I hadn't. (Because upgrading to something other than a newer m0n0wall requires non-trivial network downtime as well as unmounting and opening of hardware)

[bpetty]

And now the hard reality kicked M0n0wall out of business.... fine next time ask me first and then you choose not to give away all the code for big companies like Sony who just make it closed source and let you die in the Desert without water.

I find this BSD hate so strange. Did you notice all of the alternatives listed: pfSense, FreeNAS, OPNSense. Spoiler alert, all BSD based.
I sleep well knowing that my MacBook Air is powered by BSD licensed software.

[brad0]

I find this BSD hate so strange. Did you notice all of the alternatives listed: pfSense, FreeNAS, OPNSense. Spoiler alert, all BSD based.
I sleep well knowing that my MacBook Air is powered by BSD licensed software.

There is no point in trying to reason with morons on this site.

[MoonMoon]

I find this BSD hate so strange. Did you notice all of the alternatives listed: pfSense, FreeNAS, OPNSense. Spoiler alert, all BSD based.
I sleep well knowing that my MacBook Air is powered by BSD licensed software.

Some people base their choice of tools on dogma, some on technical merit.

[Luke_Wolf]

I find this BSD hate so strange. Did you notice all of the alternatives listed: pfSense, FreeNAS, OPNSense. Spoiler alert, all BSD based.
I sleep well knowing that my MacBook Air is powered by BSD licensed software.

AFAICT it basically boils down to zealotry from the Free Software camp where they feel that people in the permissive camp are sell-outs and traitors because they allow the possibility for proprietary software to use their software.

Of course there's also some back and forth between the Linux and BSD camps, where the BSDs see Linux as forcing certain things on the ecosystem and then dropping them (such as HAL) and Linux sees BSD as too conservative.

I think the whole fight is stupid personally, but I'm in the open source camp.

[WorBlux]

I tried monowall once, got something like 9 months of uptime before the power went out for a few minutes. For a simple firewall a BSD base works just fine for me. When I want to do somethign fancier I go with linux just for the fact there's more resources out there to walk you trough various projects.

[BSDude]

AFAICT it basically boils down to zealotry from the Free Software camp where they feel that people in the permissive camp are sell-outs and traitors because they allow the possibility for proprietary software to use their software.

Of course there's also some back and forth between the Linux and BSD camps, where the BSDs see Linux as forcing certain things on the ecosystem and then dropping them (such as HAL) and Linux sees BSD as too conservative.

I think the whole fight is stupid personally, but I'm in the open source camp.

I'm not sure if that can be called conservatism, there's only a fraction of devs working on BSD derived projects compared to GNU/Linux, that definitely imposes the question of how to allocate resources and priority. Anyways, I'm looking forward on seeing launchd ported to FreeBSD.