Netgate didn’t build pfsense from scratch, it’s a fork of monowall which is in turn basically just a GUI on top of the networking stack that ships with FreeBSD.

Netgate didn’t build pfsense from scratch, it’s a fork of monowall which is in turn basically just a GUI on top of the networking stack that ships with FreeBSD. Netgate deserve some credit for their effort, but not so much that we should turn a blind eye when they get bitchy and malicious about the use of open source code. I’ve said for a long time now that the whole AES hardware requirement would prove to be little more than a red herring to dampen open hardware sales; it’s pretty hard to argue otherwise now.