In March 2014, in order to protect the pfSense® community and project from any legal challenge as to ownership of contributions, we introduced a contributor license agreement, modeled on the CLA for the Apache project.
Today, there are over 200 individuals who are contributing to the pfSense project under the terms of the CLA.
In July 2016. we moved pfSense license to the Apache 2.0 License because the 2-Clause and 3-Clause BSD license do not provide direct language around the areas of copyright, patents and trademarks, while the Apache 2.0 License does. The Apache 2.0 License also includes the following clause:
5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions.
This clause serves to give the same protections for the community and project as the CLA, and confirms our decision to move pfSense software to the Apache 2.0 License. Given the Apache 2.0 license, we no longer need the CLA. In order to make our GitHub workflow easier, starting today agreeing to the contributor license agreement is no longer necessary in order to contribute to our project.
We are sincerely grateful to everyone who contributes to the pfSense project. We are thankful to those who contribute with code, everyone who tests pfSense and contributes bug reports, our over 300 translators who have done an amazing job completely translating pfSense software version 2.4 to over 13 languages, with more to come, and everyone who adds documentation.