Hello,
You have come to the right place 
It seems to have been an open secret, but it is indeed very sad that this development has happened. Unfortunately it seems to be a bit of a trend right now which is very concerning and I wrote a little blog article about it:
I think Linux is much more superior when it comes to networking. It is fast, and a much more modern operating system than any of the BSDs. Their focus is a slightly different one.
IPFire is also much better when it comes to supported hardware, and since more people are fluent with Linux debugging anything is a lot easier when you feel familiar with the OS.
I am glad you asked that. It is indeed a very important question, and luckily the answer is a simple one:
No, we can’t. The reason for that is software licensing.
The BSD (either 2-clause, 3-clause) and the MIT license under which most of the software in the BSD ecosystem (and in this particular case pfSense) is allows that you do whatever you want with the software itself, including selling it for money, and not publishing any changes under the same license.
In the Linux world, we usually use the GNU General Public License (or GPL for short) which mandates that any changes of the software have to be made public again. At IPFire, we do not exercise any copyright assignment or other ways to transfer the copyright of the software to any body else than the author itself.
That means that the code of IPFire is owned by many people - everyone who has contributed a line has the full copyright on it and we would need their permission if we wanted to change this. This simply won’t happen and we don’t want to do it any ways.
I strongly believe that if you are doing security software and you are hiding the code, you are doing it wrong. And that includes OPNsense with their commercial version, too. I do not know which code I am running, because I only get the compiled version, but I have no idea what is actually in it.
At IPFire, we make this absolutely transparent and I believe that is the only way to do it.
Regarding funding: Times are not easy right now. Everyone working on the project has a fridge to fill and rent to pay. Therefore I would like to emphasise that we need money, too. We do this by donations, and if you can, please donate and help us to keep this project moving forward and make IPFire better
We have dehydrated because I liked that one better
Available.
That is a standard feature.
I do not know what this does, but we have ad-blocking integrated into the main OS.
Search on here and you will find some things about VPN providers. Look for Peter’s posts on it.
That would be the default configuration - we can this recursor mode.
I am sure IPFire is the right choice to replace your pfSense system with. Some things might be slightly different, but in the end, you will have a firewall that secures your network and probably performs a lot better on that hardware
-Michael