OpenVox: the community releases its Puppet fork

2025-01-21 · Publisher : Vox Pupuli · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

On 21 January 2025, the Vox Pupuli project releases OpenVox 8.11, the first release of a community "soft fork" of Puppet, after Perforce tightened its binary distribution policy.

### Background On 21 January 2025, Vox Pupuli, the community that maintains many Puppet modules, releases OpenVox 8.11. It is the first OpenVox release, presented as the community-maintained open source implementation of Puppet. The project speaks of a "soft fork": it aims to stay compatible downstream, and proposed creating with Perforce, which owns Puppet, a steering committee for language standards. ### Key facts - OpenVox 8.11 is described as functionally equivalent to Puppet and a drop-in replacement: same commands, modules, extensions and configurations. - The project states the release has not received the same level of testing as Puppet and does not recommend it for critical production environments at this stage. - Packages are first distributed from apt and yum repositories run by the company Overlook InfraTech, before a planned move to Vox Pupuli's own infrastructure. - Context: Perforce announced that future Puppet binaries and packages would be published to a private repository under an end-user licence agreement, with a commercial licence required beyond 25 nodes (per Wikipedia). ### Why it matters After Terraform (OpenTofu) and Redis (Valkey), Puppet now has its own community fork when the vendor restricts access to binaries. For teams still running a Puppet-managed estate, the topic is concrete: a change in distribution policy can force a subscription or a migration. The fork offers an exit path, provided one waits for the project to mature. ### Takeaway The third major infrastructure tool in two years to see a community fork follow a change in the vendor's model.

Tags : Open Source, Licence, Infrastructure as Code, DevOps