Poll: Should Vox adopt the open community fork of Puppet?

[binford2k]

The community has collectively determined that the fork is inevitable. There are many open questions about the project, but the first big question is how it's homed. After that decision, we can finalize the name choice. The two major proposals are

1. Do the work to create some kind of new entity, whether it's a standalone org or joining the Linux Foundation or the like. This will require a hefty amount of startup work and ongoing administrative overhead.
2. Adopt it under Vox Pupuli and level up this organization to meet the new needs. This will also require both startup and ongoing admin work but not as much. And since the overlap between the projects is large, much of it will be shared.

This poll is whether we should choose option 2 and adopt the new fork into Vox Pupuli.

If we were to take this on then it would mean:

• Cloning this list of repositories to the voxpupuli namespace and tagging them with a communityfork label for filtering purposes. (we'll rename the label once we have a project name selected)
• Extending our governance docs to include fork governance
• Establishing a language steering committee
• Establishing a more complete security group and response protocol
• Refactoring all cloned repos to use consistent community health docs like contribution guide and code of conduct. Possibly updating ours as needed.
• Create a home for the project on the website

🔔 For clarity: this proposal in no way would require any more effort or involvement from Vox Pupuli members other than the PMC and anyone who steps up to a new position. You will have opportunities for more involvement, but it is completely up to you whether you want to participate.

Please vote by reacting to this issue. Feel free to discuss below, but the reaction is how the decision will be tracked.

• 👍 Yes, let's adopt
• 👎 No, let's do something else
• 🚀 Let's go all in and adopt Bolt too!

[binford2k]

Please don't let implementation details sway your opinions here. For example, we might consider moving https://github.com/openpuppetproject to Vox control instead of cloning repositories. We've still got a lot of details to work out.

And adopting by Vox Pupuli in no way prevents us from later moving the entire Vox Pupuli org into the Linux Foundation or the like.

[bschonec]

Can someone post the reasonings for the [upcoming?] fork? Is Puppetlabs/Perforce abandoning Puppet or is this more of an OpenOffice/LibreOffice style fork?

[silug]

Can someone post the reasonings for the [upcoming?] fork? Is Puppetlabs/Perforce abandoning Puppet or is this more of an OpenOffice/LibreOffice style fork?

@bschonec You probably want to read up:

• https://www.puppet.com/blog/open-source-puppet-updates-2025
• https://dev.to/puppet/puppet-community-townhall-recap-333j

[ekohl]

IMHO it's more like the latter. Perforce isn't abandoning Puppet, but it is taking a lot of the work into private repositories and only pushing those changes to their normal git repositories at some undetermined interval. During the town hall it became obvious that Perforce leadership doesn't understand open source and I think we can no longer treat Perforce as a proper open source maintainer.

• https://dev.to/puppet/puppet-community-townhall-recap-333j

This summary is missing how deaf Perforce was to the community's concerns. There was a question what Perforce is offering people who spend time contributing and there was no answer. In other words, why should we spend effort contributing to some git repo without having any control over the direction or guarantee in the future?

I have completely lost faith in Perforce doing anything right.

Adopt it under Vox Pupuli and level up this organization to meet the new needs. This will also require both startup and ongoing admin work but not as much. And since the overlap between the projects is large, much of it will be shared.

This would be my preference. There is a lot we should improve, but those are implementation details.

[jay7x]

Can someone post the reasonings for the [upcoming?] fork? Is Puppetlabs/Perforce abandoning Puppet or is this more of an OpenOffice/LibreOffice style fork?

I'd say this explains things better: OpenVoxProject/planning#11

[jay7x]

On the topic matters:

• I'm fine to keep the fork under Vox Pupuli legal entity.
• I'd prefer to have different management group (steering committee?) maybe.
• I'd prefer the repos and workflow to be under different Github org maybe.

So it'd be part of Vox Pupuli but with ability to differentiate contributors and management/admin group (not the same ppl who are PMC atm)

[ikonia]

Option 2 + All in on Bolt too (it's part of the eco system so it should cover the full lifecycle)

I have confidence and faith that the process of setting up the wider governance under Vox will position puppet to be a better product

[binford2k]

@jay7x I think that those concerns were part of why we initially shied away from Vox adoption. This is a far bigger task than any on the PMC signed up for. But there are stages -- first we define the org structure, then we elect people to fill it.

[bastelfreak]

So it'd be part of Vox Pupuli but with ability to differentiate contributors and management/admin group

Vox Pupuli already has different github groups and those groups have different permissions for different tools. The biggest group has access to all the modules, but we've smaller groups just for puppet-lint plugins, for our containers, for different gems. And some groups have only write permissions, some have admin/maintainer permissions on the repositories. This works well since ages and we can easily create new groups for the new repositories.

[towo]

Definitely Bolt as well. While I'm still miffed at implementation details in Bolt, it's really a good complimentary product, especially in our agentless workflow at @b1-systems.
I might be able to help a bit on the organizational side, although, as usual, time is rather limited, as family always takes precedence.

[bastelfreak]

@towo every help is appreciated!

[traylenator]

For a few years I've felt VoxPupuli is where puppet development is happening anyway. Absorbing the puppet itself seems good to me. The infrastructure may need to get bigger but it's totally capable I am sure.

[spotter-puppet]

I think the premise that a fork is inevitable is premature. I caution a cooling off period before any major actions are taken.

[kenyon]

@spotter-puppet since Perforce stopped public development, Perforce already did a fork.

[rwaffen]

Let's add "the puppet stuff" to VoxPupuli. A new/other org would confuse people I think. Anyone who cares about Puppet is already in VoxPupul, I would think. I'm in for it. Or in good old german Mutti-Merkel-Style "Wir schaffen das!" ("we can do it!").

[binford2k]

@rwaffen another name proposal? schaffen das agent -t 😝

[rwaffen]

mutti schafft das -t

[thomasgoirand]

Hi there. I'm part of the Debian team that did the puppetserver packaging about 2 years ago. As you may know, in Debian, we do not bundle everything in a single .deb file containing all libs: we package each and every library one by one, and make puppet server depend on it.

Doing so, we discovered a lot of very bad artifact that puppetserver was based on, like this one:
https://github.com/lynaghk/cljx

This is a very good example of careless work from Puppet Inc: using a lib that had no commit since 2016, and which is marked as deprecated.

Whatever direction is made, from our Debian package maintainer perspective, we hope that:

• Some work will be done to better manage dependencies
• That the new fork will start adopting a decent Debian packaging way, hopefully re-using what we've been doing

In any ways, we're very happy to see things moving, and hopefully, have folks that will better receive our commits and suggestions. Best would be if the new fork was completely adopting what we consider the way of shipping software, and work with us directly.

I very much wish VoxPupuli fork to succeed, and the commercial thing to die.

Cheers,

Thomas

[jorhett]

During the town hall it became obvious that Perforce leadership doesn't understand open source

They never have. I wrote my concerns about them at length when they acquired Puppet, and every single thing I expected has come true.

I think we can no longer treat Perforce as a proper open source maintainer.

If you ever thought they were, you were sadly mistaken. Didn't you see the various gamification attempts they made trying to screw up Git? I guess you've never sat through one of their presentations where they misrepresent, er sorry, lie with abandon about the risks of open source.

Yes, there are risks in open source. But Perforce never once named a legitimate issue in any presentation I saw, and they went far deep into a fantasy land about completely invalid and long-since well-handled risks.

I have completely lost faith in Perforce doing anything right.

I never had it, as you can probably tell. I'm very happy to hear about this fork, as I was certain it would be necessary.

[ekohl]

I never interacted with Perforce prior to the acquisition. Call me neutral prior to the townhall but I felt like were thrown back 20 years in term of FUD around open source. Guess you were unlucky enough to interact with them before

[dhollinger]

I never interacted with Perforce prior to the acquisition. Call me neutral prior to the townhall but I felt like were thrown back 20 years in term of FUD around open source. Guess you were unlucky enough to interact with them before

I think this has a lot to do with the belief that because RedHat hit $1bn as an Open Source company, that it's easy for everyone. Once they realized it couldn't be monetized the way they want it to be, it's back to the FUD.

Think about this: RHEL, OpenShift, Foreman, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Kubernetes(not the best example, IMO), etc - none of these projects are proprietary and are not the primary revenue streams. These are made to either support the primary revenue stream or to build tools/convenience/support on top of them.

[binford2k]

resolved: Vox is adopting