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This is probably a good thing for Puppet. If the want to drive adoption of their software in the enterprise, it's better to switch to a more permissive license than the somewhat Idealistic GPL. It will make corporate legal departments more comfortable with the idea of using Puppet.
I am amazed that something as far reaching as a license change is based on "I heard this, I heard that" logic.
Presumably you're customers will be using similar logic so it's not completely invalid.
What a crappy article. The author clearly didn't do the homework - and instead resorts to a bunch of conjectures.
I keep wanting to try Puppet, but they have very effectively hidden the OSS version. Where the hell is it?
http://www.puppetlabs.com/misc/download-options/

What the hell are you talking about, that was linked right off their homepage as "Download". Can't really be any less hidden than that.

Plenty of enterprise software products have "Download" pages, but they're usually for evaluation versions.

I tried clicking two different download links on the home page:

https://img.skitch.com/20110503-pa1axqcg8njxqc4t4gcd756j16.j...

Both of which take you to this form:

https://img.skitch.com/20110503-e8a87jdr5ns9asabt1yyyn2jib.j...

which has no reference to the open source edition.

The next place I check is "Community" since that's often where "Community Editions" live. No reference on any of those pages to the development of the core product, only add-ons.

If I click yet a third download link, in the secondary navigation, I get a nearly-identical form:

https://img.skitch.com/20110503-j37g25rkatu2r626ykt2xp3jqp.j...

Which says I can only download "related Puppet components".

Which takes me to yet another form:

https://img.skitch.com/20110503-gxtt1bg614t23gqnqnhxhans3y.j...

With a no-registration-required link buried at the bottom.

Which takes me to the aforementioned "Download" page:

https://img.skitch.com/20110503-fnshtrwdmmd7xkfnm2gk1xsriy.j...

which has no reference to the fact that it's the open-source version I'm downloading. If I scroll ALL the way down to the bottom, I see a link to the source on Github.

There is only one mention of the word GPL on the main Puppet site, and that's in a blog post from a few days ago announcing the license switch.

I stand my my assertion that the OSS product is very well hidden.

I'd say it is easier to just do "gem install puppet" if you have ruby already installed.
And "apt-get install puppet" if you're on Debian or Ubuntu.
https://github.com/railsmachine/moonshine if you're deploying a Rails app to a VPS like Linode or Slicehost.

It's a handy wrapper around puppet that lets you go from bare server to fully deployed Rails app with one config file, two commands, and about 10 minutes of automated package installs.

this looks pretty cool. Happen to know any similar projects for python?
Unless you particularly need the absolutely latest version (or further up-to-date, the bleeding edge development version) then

    aptitude install puppet
(or the yum equivalent, or what-ever your chosen OS setup's package management is based on) should do the trick and you'll get security updates along with your usual update process and library dependencies (if you are missing any) will be handled for you.
you should work on your about page. Do a five minute usability test and ask five random people what puppet does. Hint: The only clue is hidden in the book ad at the very end of the page.