Forem: Vox Pupuli

An Unsupportable Path

VoxBot — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back in December Gene 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.

The first VoxConf is happening!

VoxBot — Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first VoxConf is happening! We will do our first cozy conference this summer.NETWAYS is generous and sponsors the location, the event will take place at Deutschherrnstraße 15 - 19, 90429 Nürnberg (Germany), on the 17th of July (Thursday), 2025. The event will start in the morning and finish at noon. It will be a single-track conference.

You want to speak about Vox Pupuli, Puppet, OpenVoxProject or anything related? Submit your proposal, for a 25min or 45min slot, until the 20th of June at midnight, to pmc@voxpupuli.org.

You are wondering why this is a half-day event? As every year, the awesome Foreman people celebrate their birthday. Their event takes place in the same location, at 1pm. We’re organizing the events after each other, so you have the ability to attend all talks, and we encourage you to do so.

You can find more information about the Foreman event in their forum.

NETWAYS will soon provide a registration website for both events, and there won’t be any fees. The entrance will be free.

Vox Pupuli will sponsor a gettogether in the evening of the 16th of July, the evening before the conference. We will also provide a travel fund with a total of € 5000. Please write to the PMC until the 20th of June at midnight, if (and how much) you require travel funding.

The Perforce EULA and impact on Vox Pupuli

VoxBot — Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In November 2024, Perforce announced that they will stop providing most tools & projects as open source.

In early 2025, Puppet will begin to ship any new binaries and packages developed by our team to a private, hardened, and controlled location. Community contributors will have free access to this private repo under the terms of an End-User License Agreement (EULA) for development use. There will be no license changes for the open source version of Puppet.

As the top community contributors to the Puppet module ecosystem and the maintainers of much of the Puppet module testing pipeline tooling, Vox Pupuli has significant expertise in the developer experience. The Vox Pupuli PMC immediately reached out to Perforce to discuss the provided “PUPPET® CORE DEVELOPER PROGRAM LICENSE AGREEMENT” in hopes of improving it and reducing the friction to contributing Puppet modules.

The Vox Pupuli community has reached the conclusion that we are unable to sign the Puppet Core Developer EULA. The restrictions placed on usage prevent effective testing and distribution of modules and we don’t want to expose ourselves to potential legal challenges. Unfortunately, this means that Vox Pupuli modules are not tested against Puppet Core, so please use them at your own risk. We are still interested in working together with Perforce, and would prefer that modules were tested against both OpenVox and Puppet Core, but their current EULA makes this untenable.

Vox Pupuli will continue to test all of our modules against the Open Vox packages. All provided tooling from Vox Pupuli has an open source license and doesn’t require a EULA to use it, nor a CLA to participate.

Keep watching this blog for updates, we will keep you posted on future developments.

All the Vox Pupuli containers

Robert Waffen — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:43:36 +0000

You may have heard about our (now deprecated) puppetserver/puppetdb container images?
But did you know that we have a lot more containers available?
We have the brand new OpenVox containers, which replace the old puppetserver and puppetdb containers, and even some more.

OpenVox containers

openvoxserver

openvoxserver is a drop-in replacement for the old voxpupuli/puppetserver container.

openvoxdb

openvoxdb is a drop-in replacement for the old voxpupuli/puppetdb container.

openvoxagent

openvoxagent is a drop-in replacement for the old puppet/puppet-agent container. It is mostly used for testing purposes, as of now.

Vox Pupuli containers

voxbox

voxbox is a container that contains a lot of tools that are useful for OpenVox/Puppet development and testing.
It includes tools like puppet-lint, modulesync, onceover, facter, yamllint, rubocop and the Vox Pupuli testing gems.

r10k

r10k is a container that contains r10k, a tool to manage OpenVox/Puppet environments.

semantic-release

semantic-release is a container that contains the semantic-release tool, which is used to automatically release new versions of software projects.

commitlint

commitlint is a container that contains the commitlint tool, which is used to lint commit messages.

See also: commitlint and conventional commits

puppet-catalog-diff-viewer

puppet-catalog-diff-viewer is a container that contains the puppet-catalog-diff-viewer tool, which is used to visualize the differences between two OpenVox/Puppet catalogs.

puppetboard

puppetboard is a container that contains the puppetboard tool, which is a web interface for OpenVoxDB/PuppetDB.

Conclusion

So you see, we have a lot of containers available.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to us on GitHub or on our other Channels
If you need help with any of the containers, feel free to open an issue on the respective GitHub repository.
Some examples of how to use the containers can be found in the CRAFTY repository.

First release, hot off the presses!

Ben Ford — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 19:54:53 +0000

It’s been quite a journey, y’all. But we’re excited to announce the first release of OpenVox, the community-maintained open source implementation of Puppet. OpenVox 8.11 is functionally equivalent to Puppet and should be a drop-in replacement. Be aware, of course, that even though you can type the same commands, use all the same modules and extensions, and configure the same settings, OpenVox is not yet tested to the same standard that Puppet is.

Migrating is fairly simple, just replace the packages following instructions on the handy dandy new install page. You’ll notice that they’re still using the apt|yum.overlookinfratech.com repositories.
As we get our infrastructure built out, these will probably be moved to the voxpupuli.org namespace. Please don’t use these packages on critical production infrastructures yet, unless you’re comfortable with troubleshooting and reporting back on the silly errors we’ve made while rebranding and rebuilding.

If you’d like professional assistance in the migration, check out the support page for companies who provide migration services.

We consider OpenVox a soft-fork because we intend to maintain downstream compatibility for as long as we are able. As such, Vox Pupuli is working with Perforce to create a Puppet™️ Standards Steering Committee to set the direction of features and language evolutions.

The OpenVox project goals are pretty straightforward and aim to alleviate pain points observed by the community over the last few years:

Modernizing the OpenVox codebase and ecosystem, including supporting current operating systems.
Recentering and focusing on community requirements; user needs will drive development.
Democratizing platform support by allowing community members to contribute what they need instead of waiting for business requirements to align.
Maintaining an active and responsive open source community like the rest of Vox Pupuli's namespace.

Find out more or get involved at our GitHub namespace.

New container names for puppetserver and puppetdb

Robert Waffen — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 12:57:37 +0000

Beginning of today we are also releasing our puppetserver and puppetdb containers with shorter names.

The current names are: voxpupuli/container-puppetserver and voxpupuli/container-puppetdb.

The new, shorter names are: voxpupuli/puppetserver and voxpupuli/puppetdb.

The content is exactly the same, only the name has changed. Only new tags will be pushed to the new names. The old names will also be updated.

We plan to deprecate the old names in 6 months (2025-02), so please update your scripts and configurations to use the new names.

Vox Pupuli Elections voting period

Robert Waffen — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 07:41:26 +0000

After a slight delay, we are opening the voting period for this year’s PMC elections. Votes will be accepted until May 15 2024 23:59 UTC.

Please help us select the Vox Pupuli Project Management Committee for the 2024 year. The people on this committee will help take care of the Code of Conduct and its values, participate in strategic planning, and decision making using lazy consensus, amongst other things.

New this year, we are also adding two specialized roles:

The accounting officer will keep track of budget, expenses, and sponsorships.
The social media officer will coordinate social, blog, and other similar activities. They’re not necessarily responsible for -all- content, but will help facilitate it.

These roles will be self selected amongst the committee after the election concludes.

Visit the page below to read more about the candidates and to make your choices.

Vox Pupuli elections, 2024

Thank you so much for your help!
(original post from @binford2k at voxpupuli.org)

What it means to be a PMC member

Robert Waffen — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 09:34:36 +0000

The upcoming Project Management Committee (PMC) elections are drawing near, prompting a reflection on the essence of committee membership.

In essence, being part of the PMC revolves around fostering an environment of excellence and collaboration. TL;DR: Strive to embody these principles and actively contribute to adaptation and enhancement!

Having served on the PMC for a year now, I've encountered no major issues. But what constitutes a problem, you may wonder? Allow me to elaborate briefly: As a committee member, one of your primary responsibilities is maintaining peace and harmony within our chat rooms and forums. Should tensions arise, your role is to defuse conflicts and, if necessary, take measures such as user bans. Fortunately, such interventions have not been required within the Vox Pupuli community, which prides itself on its serene, inclusive atmosphere. Over my two years of increasing involvement, I've yet to witness a situation necessitating moderator (PMC member) intervention. For guidance on conduct, our Code of Conduct can provide valuable insights.

In addition to responsibilities, PMC membership also grants certain privileges. One such privilege is administrative access on GitHub. However, as the adage goes, "with great power comes great responsibility!" This access is bestowed upon members to facilitate the migration of others to Vox Pupuli or to manage organizational settings. Tasks may include adding new members on GitHub or implementing changes suggested directly on the platform.

Curious about the current PMC team? Meet them here. These individuals were elected last year. If you're considering joining, you can submit your application via the plumbing repository on GitHub. Simply create a pull request and add yourself or nominate someone else. For example: My nomination by @tuxmea. Yes, you read that correctly – you can also nominate others whom you believe would be valuable additions to the PMC.

For a comprehensive overview of PMC membership duties, refer to our Governance Document.

Vox Pupuli is now also on dev.to

Robert Waffen — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 12:52:38 +0000

As of today, we've officially joined dev.to, a leading platform for tech and development blogging. In addition to our established blog on voxpupuli.org, we'll be expanding our reach to include dev.to. Stay tuned for upcoming posts, including insights into the Project Management Committee (PMC) election and the significance of being part of the PMC. These initial posts mark the beginning of our journey on both platforms, and we're excited to see where it takes us.