[geofft]

What prevents companies from using those downloads for commercial use? Is it "just" a copyright violation (i.e., the same thing that prevents them from paying for one copy of Windows and running a thousand), or is there something in the code (limits on scaling, time bombs, etc.) to make them unsuitable for production use?

[holoway]

Historically the answer is nothing, or very little. The commercial products have a licensing mechanism that nags you, or at least it did. I don't know what their plan is on that - but I know they'll do it in public now. :)

Since everything Chef makes is used for production infrastructure, they have historically avoided doing anything that would break functionality for license compliance.

[bgoldy]

from our FAQ at http://www.chef.io/bmc-faq/

"All Chef’s software is mission critical and runs in a variety of different use cases and environments. As a result, we have not implemented hard enforcement and we don’t have any plans to change that. What we do have are commercial terms that we expect users of the software to honor. Users will have to accept the terms of the Chef End User License when they first run our software. Once the license acceptance has been acknowledged, acceptance can be automated to avoid the need for user input for further deployments. "