Chef License Change

Sous Chefs, as one of the most active communities around Chef, we felt it would be useful and appropriate to respond to the recent announcements from Chef.

What does this mean for us

For us, this announcement does not have any major changes or impact, we manage and supply community resources to the ecosystem, mainly through cookbooks; Apache2, Redisio, Nginx, Haproxy are the most popular amongst the 50 we maintain. Alongside tooling such as the language-chef plugin for atom, and expect our community tooling to increase in the future. From a licensing perspective, nothing changes for us, we are covered under the “organization who has made a significant contribution to our Open Source projects”.

Going forward what changes

We do not see any changes going forward, if there is a new community distribution our cookbooks should work, likewise with Chef Infra our cookbooks will continue to work. We are members of the community with no incentives from Chef for support or priorities.

Support for all sides in this

While we can see exactly how and why Chef would do this, we have no strong opinions on any sides, after all our tooling is distribution agnostic, going forward we will continue to test against Chef Infra, but that does not mean we will not help in supporting any major distributions that come out of this process.

What about financing Sous Chefs

It has been mentioned that Chef finance Sous-Chefs, that is not fully accurate, Chef donate funds to enable our use of CircleCI. Our finances are clear and easy to see on: https://opencollective.com/sous-chefs We pay out of this for all of our other needs, such as video conferencing for weekly calls, web and domain hosting.