Chef, the open source configuration management company, found itself the recipient of a strongly worded blog posting last week by a former employee named Noah Kantrowitz, who claimed that Chef is not really acting like an open source company (at least according to Kantrowitz). While these debates over open source have been going on for years, Kantrowitz’s post and Chef’s subsequent response by its chief development officer Adam Jacob, highlighted the difficulties open source companies face when they start getting big.
Kantrowitz, who worked for Chef (then known as Opscode) as a lead web developer from 2011 through 2013, wrote that he has witnessed a shift in the way Chef has been operating over the years that led him to question whether or not the company is interested in maintaining its open source ideals. In an interview, Kantrowitz said that while his blog posting’s headline was “intentionally inflammatory†(the title was “Chef is not Open Sourceâ€), he wanted attention pointed to the fact that Chef’s community engagement is not what used to be when Chef was first getting off the ground.
Read more at GigaOM.
