On Sunday, October 14, 2012 7:26:23 PM UTC-5, Nigel Kersten wrote: > > On Saturday, October 13, 2012 8:23:57 AM UTC-7, Paul Belanger wrote: > >> On Friday, October 12, 2012 10:10:54 AM UTC-4, windowsrefund wrote: >>> >>> Recently, there have been some changes made to the Puppetlabs website >>> which result in the free software releases being difficult to locate and >>> download. >>> >>> Visitors using the download links are taken directly to the non-free >>> "Enterprise" option rather than being presented with an option. >>> >>> Personally, I'd like to see the site reverted so users have the option. >>> >>> FYI, the wiki section still provides this useful content here: >>> >>> http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/downloading_puppet >>> >>> Best, >>> Adam Kosmin >>> >> >> I was asking this on IRC the other day. I understand the need to collect >> information for prospective customers, however requiring a pay wall >> (personal information) to access the open source tarballs does not seem to >> be in the spirit of free software[1]. >> > > There are lots of ways people get open source Puppet, and not many people > actually grab them in tarball form from the website from the stats we have. > > Apart from being in the distributions, most of you seem to be getting > software from the apt/yum repos, which don't require a paywall: > > http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/puppetlabs_package_repositories.html > > If you're hitting the main page, yes, the "Download" link goes to PE by > default, with a link to the OSS download page at the bottom. > > The "Products -> Puppet Open Source" link on the main page takes you here: > > http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-open-source/ > > where we promote getting the source from GitHub rather than tarballs > directly from us. > > The reasoning has generally been that if you want to use Puppet, the best > way of consuming it is via packages, and if you want to get the source, the > best way of consuming it is via Git. > > That way updates are simpler for users, and development from source is > simpler for developers. > >
For what it's worth, I always prefer to get source for third-party software, and my absolute *least* favorite way to do so is from a source-control repository. I particularly like source RPMs, but tarballs generally work just fine for me. More generally, I want *one file*, associated with a specific release of the software and so labeled, and accessible via a general purpose network protocol such as HTTP or FTP from a location sponsored by the project. I don't see any dark conspiracy behind PL's website changes, but I am a bit surprised by some of the responses from PL personnel. The tone, if not the actual content, seems in some cases to say "there's nothing wrong, why are you bothering us with this?" Clearly something *is* wrong as far as Adam is concerned. PL is certainly not obligated to cater to any individual user's preferences -- or even to the whole community's preferences -- but it is not helpful to anyone to try, as some of the responses seemed to do, to deny their validity. Given a complaint that the source tarballs are hard to find, I would have expected a response more along the lines of > We're sorry the changes to our web site have inconvenienced you. We > assure you that our intent is not to hide or block access to open-source > Puppet. We will consider whether the site can be changed further to better > serve both PE and our open-source Puppet users. > I might even have expected a suggestion to file a ticket or a solicitation for further community comment. John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/puppet-users/-/V7QOTlFLbZUJ. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
