Chef Software has announced a decision to stop using the Open Core business model, in which only the basic components of the system are freely distributed, and advanced features are delivered as part of a commercial product.
All components of the Chef configuration management system, including the Chef Automate management console, infrastructure management tools, the Chef InSpec security management module, and the Chef Habitat delivery automation and orchestration system, will now be fully available under the free Apache 2.0 license without separation into open and closed parts. All previously closed modules will be opened. The product will be developed in a publicly accessible repository. The development, decision-making and design processes are planned to be made as transparent as possible.
It is noted that the decision was made after a long study of various models of commercialization of open source software and the organization of interaction in communities. The Chef developers believe that the full open source will best balance the expectations of the community and the business interests of the company. Instead of splitting the product into an open and proprietary part, Chef Software will now be able to devote all available resources to the development of a single open product, acting together with enthusiasts and companies interested in the project.
To meet the needs of enterprises on the basis of open source, a commercial distribution kit Chef Enterprise Automation Stack will be formed, which will be distinguished by additional testing and stabilization, the provision of technical support in 24Γ7 mode, adaptation for use in systems requiring increased reliability, and a channel for prompt delivery of updates. In general, Chef Software's new business model is very close to Red Hat's methods of offering a commercial distribution, but developing all software as open source projects available under free licenses.
Recall that the Chef configuration management system is written in Ruby and Erlang, and offers a domain-specific language for creating instructions ("recipes"). Chef can be used to centrally reconfigure and automate application management (installation, update, removal, launch) in server parks of various sizes and cloud infrastructures. Including automation of deployment of a stuffing of new servers in cloud environments of Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack and Microsoft Azure is supported. Chef-based solutions are used by Facebook, Amazon and HP. Chef control nodes can be deployed on RHEL and Ubuntu based distributions. All popular Linux distributions, macOS, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris and Windows are supported as control objects.
Source: opennet.ru