Open Source Insider

Chef open sources 100% under Apache 2.0

Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater

Open source Ruby and Erlang based configuration management tool company Chef has now committed to develop all of its software as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.

Open open open… yet always with a nod to commercial enterprise grade, the company balanced its open announcement with the introduction of a new commercial distribution, the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack.

Commercial yes, but Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is built from the same open source code.

Chef says it welcomes any use of its open source projects for any purpose (in alignment with the four freedoms of FOSS) and welcomes future contributions.

  1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
  2. The freedom to study how the program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish — access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
  4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others  — by doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes — and, again, access to the source code is a precondition for this.

These new developments are hoped to streamline procurement, deployment and use of Chef products including Chef Infra (formerly Chef), Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, Chef Automate and Chef Workstation.

“Moving all of our code to open source stays true to the philosophy that Chef was founded on, that a community of collaborators with the ongoing ability to create software for their shared purpose is good for all,” said Adam Jacob, founder and board member of Chef. “The value of that collaboration lies in the software and everyone should have access to make what they want from it.”

The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack will unify previously distinct solutions — Chef Automate, Chef Infra, Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat and Chef Workstation.

The company aims to help firms to express infrastructure, security policies and application lifecycle as code.

This software is intended to help users to manage heterogeneous, complex environments and applications — and, crucially, it claims to eliminate the need to re-write applications for the cloud and enables comprehensive portability across any public or private platforms or services.