Am 11.04.2016 um 00:47 schrieb James Turnbull: >> One last very important factor to the mentioned frustration is the fact >> that Puppet is an Open Source product. People over here in Europe see >> this stricter than they might in the US. If you say "...and it has an >> Enterprise version", 99% of the time "Oh, so it isn't really open?" is >> the reaction you get. And for many it's not about the cost. Many large >> rich companies use a lot of Open Source software. Not because it is >> cheaper, but because it doesn't lock them in. > > (disclosure - I no longer work at Puppet although I remain a shareholder) > > Puppet is a business.
No doubt. I had above conversation with a customer who I convinced to by PE the very same day. I explained it's advantages, they decided to buy it. But not before being assured that there is no hidden lock in. They had no problem with the money at all. It was a small national bank of a country not being part of the Euro, so they are printing their money themselves. But they wanted to make sure that Puppet was serious about being "open". By that time they have already been long time Puppet users. You know, when "import" was still a thing ;) > Who contributes to Puppet open source? There have been a handful of key > contributors (Hi Brice!) who haven't been paid by (Puppet|Reductive) > Labs. That amazing open source product you use is paid for by selling > the "evil" Enterprise version and prior to that by professional services > and prior to that by Luke consulting and doing custom development. I know, I work for an Open Source company. The "community" is VERY demanding. But who writes most of the code? We have to mostly do so ourselves. We get quite some contributions, some very good ones, and many others would have caused less work if we had done them by ourselves. We live from consulting, customizations, support and professional services. You'll not get rich that way. Our business model doesn't scale. But hey, it makes fun, we earn enough for a living, I work for a healthy company, our software is being used all over the world. Our advantage: we are not driven by Venture Capital, we are allowed to grow slowly. Releasing an Open Source software is nothing Luke has been forced to do. And no, there is nothing evil with an Enterprise version. > They'll always be a tension between what's open source and what's not, > there'll always be different customers/users for both products but > without that tension and those customers there wouldn't be an open > source product to use at all. That's not an issue at all. There should just be some clear line explaining where Open Source ends and Enterprise starts. And "Enterprise" shouldn't make life harder for people. I initially had so much pain with the customer I mentioned above. They wanted to have a redundant installation, and Puppet rolled out by Puppet. No issue at all I thought, I did this many times before with OSS Puppet. Then I digged deeper into the first Puppet Enterprise installer and wondered how I could ever get this done in an idem-potent upgrade-safe way... Btw, once there was "Live Management" a thing I tried to use that feature as a USP to sell PE. Honestly, I never had a serious use case for it. Some manager liked it, didn't work for tech people. Seen from today, I'm happy that it didn't work, as I would have felt very bad being forced to tell them that that promoted feature was going to be deprecated. What still works well is using "Professional AIX/Solaris support" as a selling argument. The new frontend is very cool, but that didn't really work as a good argument for PE. It's hard to explain that one has to pay a license for every node if he wants to use a specific frontend on the master. Eventually apart from node-based licensing trying to find products easy to sell as helpful additions to Open Source environments could work quite well for Puppet. But back to why I wrote the above. I remember that Puppetlabs stated that Puppet will always be open. Many moves in the past and some announcements felt like this might change a little bit. Sure, it will stay open. But it could change in a way making it hard to use Puppet without buying PE. Someone who comes from a Ruby-based Puppet world already feels locked out by the Server being Java/Clojure, Facter a binary and everything AIO-packaged. That's what they only know from non-OSS vendors. Non of this is a problem on it's own, but together... one might get mixed feelings. I guess you misread my above statement, or my English was too bad to express myself clearly enough. I mentioned this OSS thing just by the end, after many other statements. Not because I do not like Enterprise versions. But because I see that there is quite some uncertainty amongst Puppet users regarding the direction OSS Puppet might take. And in my believes this is absolutely related to what Alex brought up. Unrequited love, feeling betrayed, not sure how to name it. Cheers, Thomas -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/puppet-dev/neepdt%24r08%241%40ger.gmane.org. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
