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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

Smells like the end of Chef. Management doesn't understand how much it takes to maintain the open source project and is just pouring resources into sales and marketing and products that they can charge for, and don't see how that erodes goodwill and the technological foundation of the company.

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I also saw that parallel with Chef. I think its the story of all VC funded software that attempts to be "Open Source". For them, Open Source means "You can read the source code, and potentially fix a bug", for us, it means community, transparency, and fixing bugs beyond those your paying customer has.

I looked at github /chef/chef and github /inspec/inspec and its the same as it was shortly after I left. The only changes are from the one person who carried over after the sale to Progress, and the contracting team out of India, with dozens are unanswered queries and pull requests from the community.

What really ruffles my feathers was when they had us define oss-practices (https://github.com/chef/chef-oss-practices), clearly nobody outside our small team read (or understood) those words and goals. It feels like it was work to make us look better in OSS in order to bolster the company sale.

There was a whole lot of community window dressing going on. I still wonder if they weren't trying to ship maintenance of the open source code off onto the community thinking that if all that worked appeared (or thinking that it was actually going on--believing their own bullshit about how involved the community was) that they could just leach that work.

There's probably some manager at Hashi right now trying to argue that they should offload TF maintenance entirely onto the community and they should pivot to hosting services and consulting and making money off of all that free work.

chef said, did and tried some really dumb stuff and lots of it failed for obvious reasons, it's like docker took a chunk of their playbook and their business went the same way.

It's all good and "fun" on the IPO up.

(in x months we will rewrite the whole universe).

Cygnus made it work. Long way from those origins to the redhat or hashicorp of today though.

Thank you Miah for all your contributions (beyond InSpec)

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