Back in December I wrote about how we, the community behind the open source project called Puppet, were being forced into forking the project. In the time since then, OpenVox was born and has been diligently chugging along creating, among other things, builds based off of the last truly open versions of Puppet 7 & 8. We have also been trying to work with Perforce to ensure OpenVox remains compatible with Puppet Core and Puppet Enterprise. We’ve given them extensive feedback both in writing and via Zoom meetings on the EULA that is attached to Puppet Core to try to make it workable for the community, but they will not make the necessary changes so that it is tenable for Vox Pupuli to test our modules against Puppet Core. Additionally, they are steadfast in their commitment to keep Facter as a private repository going forward. Facter is a critical, load-bearing part of the Puppet technology stack. If they make private changes that we don’t anticipate or know to test for, it risks breaking the entire ecosystem. Similar to their promises about OSP, they said they’ll push changes back into the public repo and take PRs, but given that they have done this zero times in the last 7 months on the puppet repo, this does not seem likely.
As a result, Vox Pupuli has come to the conclusion that we can no longer guarantee that our modules will work with Puppet Core or Puppet Enterprise. As I and others have said before, no one in the Puppet community wants to break compatibility as that only serves to fracture the ecosystem that has built up over many, many years. Unfortunately, Perforce is once again forcing our hand.
On top of that, it appears that sometime after March 21st, 2025 Perforce removed the page at https://www.puppet.com/ecosystem/contribute/trusted-contributors even though it is still linked to at https://www.puppet.com/ecosystem/contribute. You can see these for yourself thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine:
Sadly, this is not all that surprising as it is in line with them not actually being receptive to working with the community. I know that sounds harsh, but it is the reality of the matter, and was made quite evident in the Zoom meeting between Perforce and Vox Pupuli on June 10th, 2025. Most, if not all, attendees from the community left that meeting totally flummoxed by the actions and attitude of Perforce’s leadership.
So, what does all this mean? Well, it seems another chapter in the story of a free and open source version of Puppet and its supporting tools has begun. Concretely, the README of each one of Vox Pupuli’s 177 modules that are published to the Puppet Forge will be updated to make it clear that we are unable to validate their compatibility with Puppet Core and Puppet Enterprise. This also means Facter is being forked and will be published to RubyGems.org as soon as a name is decided upon. Once that is completed, all testing and build pipelines will be updated to replace the puppet gem that won’t be updated beyond 8.10.0 with the openvox gem and to replace the facter gem with the yet-to-be-named alternative. Not too long after that, an additional update to each module is planned to remove the bits from its metadata.json that says it is compatible with puppet and replace that with the module’s openvox compatibility.
To be clear, the Vox Pupuli community is not actively planning to break compatibility with existing Puppet features, but cannot guarantee continued compatibility with software we can’t legally access. As such, we are simply trying to convey this so that each user of our modules and tools knows the reality of the situation.
Unfortunately, we have reached a fork in the road that we as a community have no ability to avoid: Perforce forked the open source project into private repositories and has made it clear that is where their efforts will reside, and that the original repositories under the puppetlabs namespace on GitHub are all but abandoned. Our two choices are to either accept that after roughly 20 years of being developed in the open under first a GPL v2 or later license and, since 2011, an Apache 2.0 license that the project is no longer truly open source and only available commercially now or to continue the open source development under the moniker OpenVox. We have chosen the only reasonable route, which is the same one Luke articulated so well in 2011, and it is up to Perforce to either join us along this journey or to continue down the other road. Here’s to hoping they choose to join us.