There are over 500,000 pfSense installations in the wild. The creation of a company around pfSense has allowed them to offer real support and hire developers to improve everything from the UI to massive improvements to network stack/firewall and even IPSEC performance. These changes get pushed upstream to FreeBSD, everyone wins.
Nice, glad to see changes getting pushed upstream! It's was interesting to hit the site for the first time in many years and see how much had changed and how the project has grown!
I wonder what other projects I used to use have grown this much :)
There are two FreeBSD committers on staff (one second, the other ports), the author of the O'Reiley book on git, the guy who rewrote the GUI, and three others.
Several have really deep telecommunications equipment / router vendor experience.
Plus gnn, whom, as you say is a consultant. If we're going to include him, we should include Patrick Kennedy, who has done work on libuinet for us.