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Chef to be acquired by Progress

blog.chef.io

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Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#41

Post by PaulWaldman »

z9e wrote: post #40
PaulWaldman wrote: post #31

Progress has an interesting angle of providing a suite of developer tools with their products crossing the categories of both design-time and run-time. There doesn't seem to be too much focus at this point though, in comparison to JetBrains for example. I'd imagine more acquisitions are coming. They have the Telerik suite of tools, which is used by .Net developers, but how many .Net developers use Chef?

Anecdotally, I don’t know anyone in the windows / .NET world that is using chef, or have used it and stuck with it. Most people on that platform seem to gravitate to Chocolatey. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any using Chef primarily but it’s pretty rare it seems.

Agreed. Which is why I find it odd that their products are in a mismatch of verticals. This strategy only makes sense if more acquisitions are on the way.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#42

Post by eitally »

somesortofsystm wrote: post #15
vander_elst wrote: post #4

What is the product offering of Progress? Quickly went through the website.. not sure, but it sounds more like smoke and mirrors..

Disclaimer: I cut my teeth on Progress 4GL back in the 80's, which is now called OpenEdge. It tickles me to see them still around, and to have bought Chef? Well, that's just sugar. Basically, they're a business apps technology provider, and have been around since 1981, providing app development tools for enterprise scale applications. Progress 4GL was a database-backed application environment, quite widely used (albe…

Ditto this. I was a ASP/VB-then-.Net developer 20 years ago and happened upon Progress 4GL when I had to create apps either communicating with or extracting data from Progress sources. My only beef was the horrifically quirky ODBC driver (and the convoluted SQL Server DTS packages & openqueries that resulted) -- 4GL was rock solid on AIX, and also on CentOS/RHEL once we moved away from AS400... and this was for high volume factory execution systems at a global EMS firm. Around 2010, we started a migration from Progress --> PostgreSQL+Java, approximately when the majority of the original devs began retiring. It was painful and the resulting "new" versions of our apps & DBs were universally crappier, even if "easier" to develop for and manage using "agile" methods. I frequently miss the old days, when programming was WYSIWYG and everyone explicitly understood how computers worked.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#43

Post by gscho »

PaulWaldman wrote: post #41
z9e wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I don’t know anyone in the windows / .NET world that is using chef, or have used it and stuck with it. Most people on that platform seem to gravitate to Chocolatey. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any using Chef primarily but it’s pretty rare it seems.

Agreed. Which is why I find it odd that their products are in a mismatch of verticals. This strategy only makes sense if more acquisitions are on the way.

Perhaps they are looking at Habitat which is a cross-platform package manager that competes with Chocolatey somewhat.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#44

Post by PixyMisa »

vander_elst wrote: post #4

What is the product offering of Progress? Quickly went through the website.. not sure, but it sounds more like smoke and mirrors..

Back in the day, Progress offered hands down the best platform for developing multi-user database-centric applications. They still sell it, but the product is now called OpenEdge and the company is called Progress (it used to be Data Language Corporation).

They have a lot of other products now as well.

Their website is marketing puff but the products are great.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#45

Post by PixyMisa »

eitally wrote: post #42
somesortofsystm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I cut my teeth on Progress 4GL back in the 80's, which is now called OpenEdge. It tickles me to see them still around, and to have bought Chef? Well, that's just sugar. Basically, they're a business apps technology provider, and have been around since 1981, providing app development tools for enterprise scale applications. Progress 4GL was a database-backed application environment, quite widely used (albe…

Ditto this. I was a ASP/VB-then-.Net developer 20 years ago and happened upon Progress 4GL when I had to create apps either communicating with or extracting data from Progress sources. My only beef was the horrifically quirky ODBC driver (and the convoluted SQL Server DTS packages & openqueries that resulted) -- 4GL was rock solid on AIX, and also on CentOS/RHEL once we moved away from AS400... and this was for high…

My job for years was developing and supporting Progress applications mainly on AIX. So much less crap to deal with than is common today. Things actually worked.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#46

Post by nicoburns »

samayylmao wrote: post #32
gostsamo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have friends working for Telerik which was bought by Progress. They feel pretty happy so far and Telerik are doing well, though they had to drop native script after react occupied the entire compile js2native space.

My organization is actually moving away from Telerik after ten years of use. My biggest complaint is how unresponsive they are to fixing bugs. After reported it may be months or a year before you see it fixed. What I dont know is if that is common in that "ui component" sector?

> What I dont know is if that is common in that "ui component" sector?

I think this is why almost nobody uses closed-source libraries. Having to pay isn't the biggest problem: it's not being able to fix issues like these yourself.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#47

Post by oblio »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #13
PaulHoule wrote: post #5

What's a good alternative to Chef?

NixOS seems to be quite interesting, an OS with declarative provisioning baked right in.

Isn't that like killing a fly with a sledgehammer?

You're proposing that he replaces a cross platform tool with an entire OS and on top of that with a tool that has a very peculiar package management system (I'm not saying it's bad, just that it kind of requires full buy-in to make it work).

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#48

Post by TinyRick »

fooqux wrote: post #34

I know nothing of Progress. Are they OSS friendly? I'd hate to see some of the OSS chef-managed tools die on the vine because of this.

From the Progress press report...

"We have a long history of supporting open source communities so I am proud to say that we will continue to nurture the vibrant and thriving Chef open source community."

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#49

Post by eropple »

z9e wrote: post #40
PaulWaldman wrote: post #31

Progress has an interesting angle of providing a suite of developer tools with their products crossing the categories of both design-time and run-time. There doesn't seem to be too much focus at this point though, in comparison to JetBrains for example. I'd imagine more acquisitions are coming. They have the Telerik suite of tools, which is used by .Net developers, but how many .Net developers use Chef?

Anecdotally, I don’t know anyone in the windows / .NET world that is using chef, or have used it and stuck with it. Most people on that platform seem to gravitate to Chocolatey. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any using Chef primarily but it’s pretty rare it seems.

Chocolatey and Chef aren't rivalrous. When I've managed Windows/Linux mixed environments before, I did use Chef, and I used Chef to install Chocolatey packages.

Chef isn't just CM, it's also a lot of policy enforcement tooling these days. I don't have much use for it anymore but it does have its niche.

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