Chef unveils new commercial product strategy, will now sell distributions of its open-source projects
Summary
There have been some twists and turns on this path for Chef, which struggled for a few years as it dealt with the rise of cloud computing and containers before retooling its products and posting what Crist has said was one of the best quarters in Chef’s history at the end of 2018. That’s unlike what Red Hat has done with Linux, sponsoring the Fedora distribution to ensure free access to the software. I think this is a good validation of where the actual value in our company comes from.Chef co-founder Adam Jacob, who stepped down from the company earlier this year but remains on the board, has been a vocal opponent of the restrictive licensing approach chosen by Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent. Companies that encourage the free use of open-source projects to market commercial venture-backed releases of important enterprise-grade features were trying to create a “funnel strategy” for their salespeople, he told me last November . Individuals using Chef’s projects or companies that want to evaluate it inside their operations will still be able to get a free limited-use license to the commercial distribution.