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Reading this makes me worry that they will no longer be providing easily installable downloads that are free for commercial use. I suppose that is a good trade

Reading this makes me worry that they will no longer be providing easily installable downloads that are free for commercial use. I suppose that is a good tradeoff, like Red Hat providing RHEL source but not installation media. But it will make harder to get started with Chef, and I don't know if there is enough community motivation to create a CentOS equivalent for Chef. I hope AWS's Open Distro project takes on more software projects (https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/ https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/).

bgoldy 8y ago
@antoncohen - We will provide easily installable downloads for non-commercial, experimentation, and individual use which should make getting started with Chef just as easy today as it was yesterday.
- geofft 8y ago
  What prevents companies from using those downloads for commercial use? Is it "just" a copyright violation (i.e., the same thing that prevents them from paying for one copy of Windows and running a thousand), or is there something in the code (limits on scaling, time bombs, etc.) to make them unsuitable for production use?
  - holoway 8y ago
    Historically the answer is nothing, or very little. The commercial products have a licensing mechanism that nags you, or at least it did. I don't know what their plan is on that - but I know they'll do it in public now. :) Since everything Chef makes is used for production infrastructure, they have historically avoided doing anything that would break functionality for license compliance.
  - bgoldy 8y ago
    from our FAQ at http://www.chef.io/bmc-faq/ http://www.chef.io/bmc-faq/ "All Chef’s software is mission critical and runs in a variety of different use cases and environments. As a result, we have not implemented hard enforcement and we don’t have any plans to change that. What we do have are commercial terms that we expect users of the software to honor. Users will have to accept the terms of the Chef End User License when they first run our software. Once the license acceptance has been acknowledged, acceptance can be automated to avoid the need for user input for further deployments. "
- mkesper 8y ago
  So you stop distributing free software/open source binaries while claiming to turn all of chef into open source? I really don't understand the motivations for that.
  - holoway 8y ago
    They aren't claiming to make it open source - they are making it open source. I explain my perspective on the motivation here: https://medium.com/@adamhjk/goodbye-open-core-good-riddance-to-bad-rubbish-ae3355316494 https://medium.com/@adamhjk/goodbye-open-core-good-riddance-...
treis 8y ago
> But it will make harder to get started with Chef IMHO this is already very hard to do. I tried recently and chef.io is an impenetrable labyrinth of different products, white sheets, data sheets, customer stories, and "Contact Sales" buttons.

bgoldy 8y ago

@antoncohen - We will provide easily installable downloads for non-commercial, experimentation, and individual use which should make getting started with Chef just as easy today as it was yesterday.

geofft 8y ago
What prevents companies from using those downloads for commercial use? Is it "just" a copyright violation (i.e., the same thing that prevents them from paying for one copy of Windows and running a thousand), or is there something in the code (limits on scaling, time bombs, etc.) to make them unsuitable for production use?
- holoway 8y ago
  Historically the answer is nothing, or very little. The commercial products have a licensing mechanism that nags you, or at least it did. I don't know what their plan is on that - but I know they'll do it in public now. :) Since everything Chef makes is used for production infrastructure, they have historically avoided doing anything that would break functionality for license compliance.
- bgoldy 8y ago
  from our FAQ at http://www.chef.io/bmc-faq/ http://www.chef.io/bmc-faq/ "All Chef’s software is mission critical and runs in a variety of different use cases and environments. As a result, we have not implemented hard enforcement and we don’t have any plans to change that. What we do have are commercial terms that we expect users of the software to honor. Users will have to accept the terms of the Chef End User License when they first run our software. Once the license acceptance has been acknowledged, acceptance can be automated to avoid the need for user input for further deployments. "
mkesper 8y ago
So you stop distributing free software/open source binaries while claiming to turn all of chef into open source? I really don't understand the motivations for that.
- holoway 8y ago
  They aren't claiming to make it open source - they are making it open source. I explain my perspective on the motivation here: https://medium.com/@adamhjk/goodbye-open-core-good-riddance-to-bad-rubbish-ae3355316494 https://medium.com/@adamhjk/goodbye-open-core-good-riddance-...

treis 8y ago

> But it will make harder to get started with Chef IMHO this is already very hard to do. I tried recently and chef.io is an impenetrable labyrinth of different products, white sheets, data sheets, customer stories, and "Contact Sales" buttons.