So, here’s an updated tl;dr on Puppet as an OpenSource project: a fork is absolutely coming now. There was a “town hall” today in which Perforce Software made it quite clear they are going to claim they want to work with the community while not actually doing so. As a result, those of us who have been following this closely reassembled, determined there was no longer hope of really working together, and that it was time to move forward accordingly. Perforce also made it clear no community thing could use the brand mark / trademark “Puppet” as well, thus the naming discussion has started (the linked GitHub org will be renamed as soon as a name is decided upon). Additionally, governance discussions are underway as well. More will be shared about this as soon as we have come to a decision. In the mean time, some thoughts on the subject are at https://github.com/OpenPuppetProject/planning/issues/7.

To be clear, none of us in the Puppet community wanted to take the fork route. Our hand has been forced by the actions of Perforce and hollow sounding promises that seem aimed at placating people. Personally, I’m really sad things have spiraled into this pit of near despair. Hopefully the community will prevail in our quest to have a truly open solution like we had prior to a couple of months ago, but with the added benefit of being directly controlled by community members.

This post is my personal take on things.

This post was originally shared on LinkedIn