Hi there,
Le 2026-01-31 à 11 h 46, Cédric Bellegarde a écrit :
Puppet remains licensed under Apache 2.0, however in late 2024 Perforce (the
current owner of Puppet) announced significant changes to the project’s
development and distribution model. As of 2025, official Puppet binaries and
coordinated upstream development are no longer published openly; instead, they
are distributed through a private infrastructure governed by a Puppet Core
Developer EULA. Public repositories receive limited or delayed updates, and
community contributors are unable to participate fully in upstream development
without agreeing to additional non-free terms.
In response, the long-standing Vox Pupuli community has created OpenVox, a
fully open-source fork of Puppet. OpenVox aims to be a drop-in replacement for
Puppet (compatible manifests, modules, and workflows) while restoring open
governance, public development, and unrestricted source and binary
distribution. Initial OpenVox releases (based on Puppet 8.x) have been
published in 2025 and are actively maintained.
Given Debian’s commitment to Free Software principles, transparent upstream
development, and reproducible public builds, the current status of Puppet
upstream raises concerns about long-term suitability in Debian.
OpenVox is now functionally equivalent to Puppet, I think Debian should
consider moving to OpenVox.
https://voxpupuli.org/openvox
Thanks for the write-up. I'm aware of the issues relating to Puppet and
my plan is, indeed, to package openvox in debian to replace the openvox
packages.
I expect to be able to complete this work before the next release, so
that forky ships with openvox and a clear upgrade path from puppet.
At work, we have a grant request pending so this effort might be funded,
so I can work on it during working hours instead of evenings and weekends :)
We should have a decision from the grant manager in a few weeks.
Thanks,
-- Jérôme
