> Chef Software announced that it will be releasing 100% of its software as Open Source, under the Apache License
If I understand the change right, it's more accurate to say y'all are releasing 99.999% of your software as Open Source. That 0.001% being the the compiled/packaged binaries that your enterprise customers will actually run in production. Which runs into the same problem as doing the open core/enterprise split, but worse. If y'all make it easy to do that compilation/packaging then there's no reason for enterprises to pay a license fee.
I started using Rails for some side projects 4-5 years ago and recently started it using it again for a side project. I remembered chef as the tool to use for server configuration from when I first got into Rails and tried to use it for my side project. My experience was not very good and I gave up after trying to find documentation on how to write a simple script. The best I got to was either giving my info to download a 400 mb Chef workstation or being sent to an external site to install the Habitat CLI tool, which I'm not clear on what that actually does. Adding to that having to find a compiled chef from some third party is not good.
Long story short, I gave up after about an hour and decided to use Docker, Digital Ocean's Docker server image, and Gitlab CI/CD to manage my deployment. I've rambled a bit and I don't know if I actually have a point here. I guess if I had to end on one, it's that there isn't an immediately obvious and easy path into the Chef ecosystem which I think once existed. Ultimately, I don't know if you should or should not care that I didn't end up using Chef. My tiny bit of developer mindshare went away, but realistically it was unlikely that I ever would send any significant money your way. But, of course, there is that small chance that my project blows up or I end up somewhere as a decision maker and that potential revenue would go to the Docker ecosystem now.
Every person can decide for themselves what story they want to tell. Chef has been declared dead/dumb/irrelevant from the beginning. It’s doing great as a business, and as software. You play your game - y’all can think it’s irrelevant, and it’ll just keep on focusing on solving people’s problems. Turns out it works.
I'd agree with this.
If they'd done this in 2012 when they were the up and coming, they might be in the lead today.
I think ultimately this wasn't 'experimenting', this was Chef thinking they'd be in the lead _without_ open sourcing. When they realized otherwise, they open sourced as a defensive measure.
I'm not involved in the day to day of the business anymore, so I don't know. I suspect now is a good time to talk to a sales rep and see what they can do.
