Many years ago now (2019ish), Chef stopped producing binaries for their software. The software itself remains FOSS, but you have to build it yourself. Cinc is a community project to build the software and distribute it (with Chef trademarks removed).
Chef is an infrastructure as code configuration system. The binaries are now proprietary. This is a FOSS replacement.
Huh. Given Ruby/Chef lost, are the Chef maintainers going for a final financial squeeze of whoever is still on the platform?
I think the license change and initial fork was back in 2019? It's been a while.
Did anyone ever tell them they lost? Are you volunteering?
The Chef-branded distribution is still built from the same open source repositories that the CINC project is built from; it isn't proprietary. It has an additional EULA that requires people to accept and thus [presumably] pay for.
It's basically the same model as Red Hat. Except Chef never had the market penetration and brand recognition as a trusted source that Red Hat has.
Signed, someone who worked for Chef for almost 13 years.
A few years ago, Chef (configuration software, sort of like ansible) changed their license, and this is a fork which maintains the open source.