Q: What do I have to differently today than I had to do yesterday?
For our existing commercial customers there is no action required.
For existing customers using Chef for non-commercial purposes, experimentation, or individual use there is no change.
For contributors to Chef OSS projects, non-profits, and other special groups we are still working on how we will partner with those communities around licensing Chef products. Stay tuned for more info.
Everyone else can continue using our current releases in perpetuity – although they will be end-of-support in 12 months and no further bug fixes or security updates will be available for those versions without a commercial arrangement. Customers who choose to use our new software versions will be subject to the new license terms and will have an opportunity to create a commercial relationship with Chef, with all of the accompanying benefits that provides.
Q: How will this impact existing customers?
For existing customers this change will not impact their usage or contracts. Companies that already pay us for Chef Infra (formerly Chef), Chef Inspec, Chef Habitat and/or Chef Automate will continue to do so and we will continue to increase the value of their relationship with Chef.
Users who do not pay Chef today (use our free open source binaries), and net new users, will have three options going forward:
License our commercial software distribution.
Take our open source code and create a software development org to build and manage their own distro (create their own downstream fork) or leverage a public free distribution (which may or may not exist).
Stay on an older free distribution in perpetuity. For example, they could use Chef 14.7.17 forever but they would not receive security updates , bug fixes or support from Chef starting 1 year after Chef 15 is released.
Finally, we will have a low cost “Essentials” suite of our commercial distributions that should satisfy the needs of smaller businesses.