About Chef Licenses

This document gives an overview of Chef product licenses and license tiers.

Before you can use distributions of Chef products, you must accept the Chef End User License Agreement (Chef EULA).

The following products also require a license key:

• Chef InSpec 6 or greater

Licensing is available for non-profit, research, and academic organizations through a special, free, or highly discounted commercial license in Progress Chef’s Non-Profit Entitlement Program.

Licenses

All Chef products are governed by the Chef End User License Agreement (Chef EULA) or the Chef Master License and Services Agreement (Chef MLSA). The source code of open-source Chef projects is governed by the Apache 2.0 license.

Third-party software included in our distributions may have individual licenses which are listed in the /opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/LICENSE file. You can find individual copies of all referenced licenses in the /opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/LICENSES directory.

Chef EULA

The Chef End User License Agreement (Chef EULA) or your commercial agreement with Progress Software Corporation governs the commercial distributions of Progress Chef products–such as Chef Infra Client, Chef Habitat, or Chef InSpec. You must accept these terms when using the distributions for the first time. For additional information on how to accept the license, see Accepting the Chef License documentation.

Chef MLSA

The Chef Master License and Services Agreement (Chef MLSA) governs distributions of older proprietary Chef products–such as Chef Automate 1.x and the Chef Management Console. You must accept this license as part of any install or upgrade process.

Apache 2.0

The Apache License, Version 2.0 governs the reuse of source code of open-source Progress Chef projects—including Chef Infra Client (“chef”), Chef InSpec, and Chef Habitat—unless specified otherwise in the project’s repository. Source code is released publicly through repositories in these organizations:

• Progress Chef
• Progress Chef InSpec
• Progress Chef Habitat

Progress Chef identifies third-party software included in our distributions in the /opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/LICENSE file of our distribution. Full copies of all third-party referenced licenses are in the /opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/LICENSES directory.

Intermediate products–such as binaries, modules, containers, and executables (including scripts or interpreted language files such as Ruby)–that Progress Chef releases on sites other than GitHub are governed by the Chef EULA. These products require a license and aren’t considered open source.

For further questions, please contact Chef Developer Relations.

License tiers

Progress Chef offers three license tiers that have different entitlements: Free, Trial, and Commercial.