Introduction

FreeSense is a free and open-source firewall and router operating system. It provides a complete web-managed firewall — rules, NAT, VPNs, DHCP, DNS, traffic shaping, monitoring, and a package manager — on a pinned FreeBSD 16 base.

Open from top to bottom

FreeSense is a fully open derivative of pfSense® CE, itself derived from m0n0wall and built on FreeBSD. Everything is public and Apache-2.0 licensed:

the base operating system and web GUI;
the package recipes; and
the entire build pipeline.

You can build the whole system yourself from source or run the official signed installer and cloud images. There is no proprietary core and no vendor lock-in.

How it is built

Every release pins exact source, ports, OS-definition, and FreeBSD revisions plus a frozen set of upstream package sources. The world, kernel, and curated package catalog are built from that sealed definition and cryptographically signed with the project key.

Signed packages publish to pkg.freesense.org; installer media and preinstalled UFS and ZFS cloud disks publish to downloads.freesense.org. Both are served over a global CDN. Installed systems fetch updates over the air, verified against the project fingerprint — no phone-home and no accounts.

No phone-home or project telemetry

FreeSense sends no device identifier, telemetry, configuration, or usage report to the project. Legacy vendor registration, dashboard polling, device-ID attachment, and automatic cloud configuration upload paths are disabled or removed.

The updater makes unauthenticated HTTPS reads to pkg.freesense.org for the RSA-signed repository manifest, update notes, repository metadata, and packages. It does not contact the marketing website for updates. Network services and optional packages you enable may contact the upstream services you configure; those are functional connections, not FreeSense project telemetry.

Release channels

FreeSense uses two active channels:

Stable 1.0.x — supported, immutable production releases. Routine development is frozen; necessary security or maintenance work is published as an explicit tagged patch such as 1.0.1.
Development 1.1 — continuously integrated experimental builds for contributors and labs. Development receives no support and is not intended for production.

System updates and optional packages have independent build fingerprints. A System-only change does not rebuild optional packages; they rebuild when package sources or the pinned FreeBSD platform changes. Installer images publish to downloads.freesense.org, while the small independent Stable and Development channel documents publish to pkg.freesense.org and are read live by the website.

See Updates & release channels for the update and downgrade boundaries.