@antoncohen - We will provide easily installable downloads for non-commercial, experimentation, and individual use which should make getting started with Chef just as easy today as it was yesterday.
Since everything Chef makes is used for production infrastructure, they have historically avoided doing anything that would break functionality for license compliance.
"All Chef’s software is mission critical and runs in a variety of different use cases and environments. As a result, we have not implemented hard enforcement and we don’t have any plans to change that. What we do have are commercial terms that we expect users of the software to honor. Users will have to accept the terms of the Chef End User License when they first run our software. Once the license acceptance has been acknowledged, acceptance can be automated to avoid the need for user input for further deployments. "