The state of nginx is fine, similar to pfsense. Both made a "Plus" enterprise support offering, open source clones were forked, the originals remain dominant for enterprise and free users anyways. Not to detract from the great projects that are being worked on, like freenginx and opnsense.

> the originals remain dominant for enterprise and free users anyways.

I'm a former pfSense user that reluctantly moved to OPNsense a handful of years ago after a lot of bad press around Netgate started circulating widely causing me to believe that support for the community offering might wane over time. I was under the impression that many people had moved off of pfSense for home use. I'm surprised by your assertion that it "remains dominant" for free users, and I wonder how you might know this?

OPNsense has been rock solid for me, btw. I was reluctant to switch only because of the time sink and perceived risk. Nobody wants to spend a weekend debugging VLAN tagging on their WAN port or some such. Luckily for me, there were no such issues when switching over.

pfSense maintains some momentum due to name recognition, but anyone who digs a little deeper will see that they're clowns and go with OPN instead.

Can you please cite some recent examples of this clownlike behavior?

Out of curiosity I googled 'pfsense clown' and found this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/opnsense/comments/1ct683k/clown_mom...

They harassed the OPNsense team, registering a domain to besmirch them and then pretended to have nothing to do with it until ICANN got involved

Oh, and they knowingly shipped a broken and insecure Wireguard to their customers, and tried to use their FreeBSD commit status to force it upstream

This is the most recent one I'm familiar with. Jason D even had to get involved and there was a lot of bad blood.

Try compiling pfSense.

No, here's an even simpler task: try compiling packages for pfSense.

The clowns from Netgate made it unbelievably difficult, for no good reason other than being antagonist to the open source community.

Meanwhile, I've never tried building OPN but it looks well documented and can be added to a vanilla FreeBSD install. https://github.com/opnsense/core

I did the same and while I never had any issues with pfSense staff being rude or condescending, I had experience such attitudes on multiple occasions with OPNSense staff, and that included my bug reports with fixes provided. I was scratching my head a lot wondering if “I was me, not them” but no, I saw this with others, too, and then realized there’s something wrong there. I don’t even bother reporting anything anymore because of that.

This is all very ironic because that kind of attitude was the main drive for many to move away from pfsense.

> OPNsense has been rock solid for me, btw

Well, it works.

But try to add some custom parameters to a daemon, which aren't listed on the page. Or try to run more routers than one. Or diag network states even on 4k monitor.

There are a thousands cuts using OPNsense in anything more than a home router. Despite ten years of trying this year I ripped it off where it was installed and replaced back with pfSense.

You know, for most projects, I'd think that'd be pretty...bad. Given that nginx only recently got dynamic module support, I'm curious how many people are out there having grown to build it from source, letting them switch upstreams a bit more easily. perhaps. maybe.

Pretty much every major nginx deployment I’m familiar with has been from source. Dynamic modules aren’t really that new but certainly post-date a lot of deployments. But also bigger deployments tend to want full control of which in-tree modules are compiled into nginx, which dependencies they pull in (for security and deployment reasons), and how quickly patches and security releases can be updated.

It also has a fairly simple from-source deployment with a fairly solid build script.

"new" is subjective -- I'll catch up with the times eventually, I'm sure :)

but yeah, I've had to write said script due to needing to compile in proprietary modules.

It's just a bit of CI glue, pretty straightforward and quick build -- thanking to it being written in C rather than C++.

TEngine might be the most well-known fork

That ones new to me, I was aware of Angie and Freenginx which are both led by developers who left F5 after they acquired the original nginx project. TEngine looks to be a much older fork but I can't find much recent discussion about it, though that may be because it's an Alibaba/Taobao project with a primarily Chinese userbase judging by the GitHub issues.

nginx is one of the building blocks inside Kubernetes. I'd say it's doing okay and probably will for the foreseeable future. I've had the chance to look into the code base and it's relatively easy to read and work with, I doubt there will ever not be funding to have people contribute.

Nginx is not one of the building blocks of Kubetnetes. It's just an Ingress controller

And albeit Nginx ingress might be most popular, I see more Traefik and Envoy around me.