Is anybody else confused about Chef ?

Kris Buytaert — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:08:22 +0000

Chef absolutely confuses me..

Luke is confused too ..

I’m clearly disappointed that someone who has been a high-profile user of Puppet but has never contributed much in the way of code (Ohloh claims 2 commits) would decide to start a whole new project rather than attempt to contribute to Puppet

Now , if you know me a bit you know that reinventing the wheel, or creating identical projects with no clear reasons is something I dislike .

When looking at Chef's FAQ there isn't really a clear reason listed why they wanted to create a new project.

I could understand if Chef were written in a total different language .. but hmm.. it's written in Ruby again .. I can only think of one other area where there are 2 major competing tools written in the same language and that is OTRS and RT, still wondering how that can happen.

One of the core values of an Open Source project is that you can contribute, adapt , and even fork.. why would you want to start over from scratch ?
So launching a competing open source project in that way therefore doesn't really seem like a smart thing to do,

Maybe one way to explain it is the European vs American style of Open Source Adoption ... , Luke has the more European approach (consultancy, build new features, support, train, evangelize, earn a good living) , where as OpsCode with Jesse Robins in charge might head for a more American style (Productize, Dual License , CashOut ).

So can the Chefs please explain why they didn't contribute to Puppet, or as their FAQ , well it doesn't really Answer any of the Questions

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - config mgmt

Is anybody else confused about Chef ?