I’ve been pretty quiet since leaving Puppet in July. And circumstances this week aren’t exactly how I wanted to pop my head up again and tell you what I was up to. I’ve done some private consulting with a few of y’all over the years, and had planned to expand on that. Check out the Services page for more information if you’re interested. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk a bit about Perforce’s actions and what I think that means for the community & ecosystem. They seized control of the Puppet Community Slack, booted all the admins from the moderator team, and banned me from the space. For context of how momentous that was, up until this week the Puppet Community has only ever banned one single person ever. To me, that implies that they’re gearing up for something that they want super strict control over messaging for. We’ve all seen this game before.

I know from personal experience with the company that they do not value the community for itself. In 2023, they flew me to Boston to explain the community to execs & VPs. Halfway through my presentation, they cut me off to demand to know how we monetize and then they pivoted into speculation on how we would monetize. There was zero interest in the idea that a healthy community supported a strong ecosystem from which the entire value of the company and product was derived. None. If the community didn’t literally hand them dollars, then they didn’t want to invest in supporting it.

But that’s to be expected, I suppose. They are a private equity company after all.

Now here’s something that many people don’t realize: the Apache 2 license does not require that the source be kept open. In fact, simply publishing a changelog might be enough to stay compliant.

I might be paranoid, but it would not surprise me one bit if they were about to close the source and make it really hard to use Open Source Puppet. That would tie right into what I know about their values. Why should they invest in supporting users who don’t hand them dollars?

I’m obviously not super happy with that idea, so I’ve spent the last couple days busily mirroring public OSS repositories from puppetlabs. I don’t quite know what happens next, but if worse comes to worst, then I’ll at least be able to republish packages.