A fork is in prospect for the well-known DevOps automation tool Puppet, following changes introduced by Perforce, which acquired it in 2022.

“We’re not forking Puppet; Perforce is forking Puppet,” said Antoine Beaupré. “What Perforce is doing right now is taking the open source code that we have collaborative (sic) used, debugged, written, collaborated, stared at and deployed on thousands of machines, and closing access to it to paying customers.”

Gene Liverman, who worked at Puppet as a site reliability engineer between 2017 and 2023, said that following an online discussion with Perforce this week “a fork is absolutely coming now … 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.”

Puppet has long existed in two forms, open source under the Apache license, and Puppet Enterprise, a commercial version built on top of the open source version.  Perforce completed the acquisition of Puppet in May 2022, and last month introduced changes to the open source model. New binaries and packages “developed by our team” will be published only to a “private, hardened and controlled location,” from early 2025, according to the post. 

Community contributors will have access to this private repository subject to an end-user license agreement “for development use.” Usage beyond 25 nodes (clients where Puppet agents are running) will require a commercial support license.

Open-source Puppet code will continue to be published under the Apache 2.0 license, however the company said that it will “slow down the frequency of commits of source code to public repositories.”

It will be more challenging to use the open-source Puppet without a commercial license, in the absence of any official compiled binaries.

According to the company, the changes have been made to “ensure security and stability for the long term.” The new process, where the main repository is private, will “increase security hardening and stability for Puppet downstream,” claimed the official post.

There is also the inevitable reference to “reimagining Puppet with the use of AI” and a further claim that reducing the number of open-source commits will help the company to innovate.

Some members of the Puppet community feel that the changes will obstruct their collaboration, as well as pushing more users towards commercial licenses. The proposed fork is their answer.

“We can’t just get off this Puppet ship. So we’re going to keep doing what we were doing before Perforce took over, which is to collaborate over code and issues, and make this product better,” said Beaupré. A GitHub repository called OpenPuppetProject has been set up, though with no code yet, and discussions are proceeding around the organization structure.

One of the immediate issues is what to call it. It cannot use the name Puppet since “Perforce has refused to let us use the name quite explicitly.” Current proposals include Muppet, Manikin, Dolly, Openvox and OpenDCM.

Dev Class asked Puppet for further comment.