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Comment by sytse | Hacker News Reader

So on one hand all the software will be open source and on the other hand there will be no free as in beer distribution anymore. Sounds similar to the RedHat model. I wonder if the community is active enough to produce a CentOS like alternative distribution for Chef.

The Essentials distribution is interesting, I wonder what is in it. I assume it will not have things like Role Based Access Control (RBAC).

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Original author of Chef here (although no longer with the company day-to-day). I would not assume that - 100% of the software Chef produces is open source, so no reason to ever differentiate on features in licensing. So I doubt they would remove anything.

Correct - Essentials is just a low cost suite of Chef products. We offer two suites,. Effortless Infrastructure, focused on core config mgmt and security/compliance use cases and Enterprise Automation Stack which includes all of that plus a wide range of app automation capabilities including dependency mgmt, lifecycle mgmt, etc.

see pricing for the suites at https://www.chef.io/pricing/

Cool! Thanks for following up.

They call out RHEL specifically as inspiration:

> Beginning on April 2, we will be making all of our products open source under the Apache 2 license and we will begin to attach commercial license terms to our software distribution (binaries) with the next major release. This is very similar to the “open source product” model most effectively run by Red Hat®, where they develop software in the open while attaching enterprise license terms to the distribution of RHEL (Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®).

I missed that, thanks for posting.

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