Puppet is dead. Long live OpenVox!

Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-toasting-wine-glasses-3171837/

This is an update to my previous blogpost Puppet goes enshittyfication (Updated).

I the meantime the fork has happened. It's called OpenVox (https://github.com/openvoxproject) in reference to VoxPupuli - the name of community of module maintainer, authors and various other contributors around Puppet. But as we all now know, the community is dead. At least for Perforce. Well... As long as they can't get any real money out of it anyways..

The most non-surprising part? As of now there are no officially maintained container images for Puppet anymore.

Martin Alfke's betadots GmbH took over the maintenance of the puppetserver and puppetdb container images. As Puppet by Perforce did abandon them years ago. Now with the fork happening and Puppet effectively being a closed-source software product - and depending on how it develops - little to absolutely no support from Perforce, it simply makes no sense for betadots anymore to do the free work for Puppet by Perforce. And they did so effective immediately. Understandably.

Hence they will be maintaining the openvoxserver & openvoxdb container images.

They announced this in a post on their betadots dev.to blog, in german but translation should work well. Read it here: https://dev.to/betadots/das-neue-puppet-open-source-projekt-heisst-openvox-2330

A questionable decision...

This means that in 2025 there are no container images for Puppet with official vendor support.

And as much as I like how this shows the power of a strong open source community...

I can't find a phrase strongly worded enough to describe this utter strategic mismanagement, so just look at this picture instead:

Photo by Photo By: Kaboompics.com: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-short-haired-woman-holding-a-pair-of-eyeglasses-4491435/