What OpenVox Is — OpenVox

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OpenVox is the community-maintained open source implementation of Puppet. Same language, same modules, same agent and server you already know. No license gates, no node limits, no corporate roadmap. Just the platform, kept open by the people who actually use it.

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Why OpenVox

For nearly two decades, Puppet defined what configuration management could be: declarative, model-driven, and built to keep thousands of machines in their desired state, continuously. A worldwide community of contributors built modules, tooling, and documentation around it.

In late 2024, that changed. Puppet's corporate owner moved development behind closed doors, discontinued public packages, and attached licensing terms that put open access out of reach for the community that had sustained the project for years.

So the community did what open source communities do. Vox Pupuli, the collective of longtime Puppet module and tooling maintainers, forked the last truly open releases and kept going. That fork is OpenVox.

From Puppet to OpenVox

Luke Kanies founds Puppet, bringing a declarative, model-driven approach to configuration management to a world of hand-rolled scripts.

Puppet Labs releases its first commercial product, built on the open-source core, with paid support and enterprise features layered on top.

A collective of Puppet module maintainers organizes as Vox Pupuli to share the work of building and testing the community's shared modules.

A Cisco-led funding round brings Puppet's total funding to $150 million, fueling a push into hybrid infrastructure discovery and CI/CD tooling.

Puppet, Inc. is acquired by Perforce Software. Puppet's Portland workforce is cut in the aftermath.

As Perforce winds down public packaging, Overlook InfraTech starts mirroring Puppet releases to keep community packages flowing.

With Puppet development shifting to Perforce's internal forks, the mirror becomes a full community fork, hosted under Vox Pupuli's OpenVoxProject namespace.

Perforce moves Puppet binaries behind a private repository and a EULA, caps free usage at 25 nodes, and slows the pace of public commits.

The fork's first public release lands: a drop-in, genuinely open replacement for Puppet, versioned to continue right where open source Puppet left off.

How OpenVox differs from Puppet

OpenVox began as a soft fork: functionally equivalent to open source Puppet, and intentionally compatible for as long as possible. If you run Puppet today, OpenVox is a drop-in replacement. Your manifests, your modules, your workflows all carry over.

The real difference is who steers it.

Development priorities come from the people running OpenVox in production, not from a product roadmap. Decisions happen in the open, and anyone can participate.

Packages, source, and release pipelines are public. There are no node-count thresholds, no EULAs to negotiate, and no risk of the code disappearing behind a paywall.

OpenVox targets current operating systems and Ruby versions, and focuses on the pain points the community has been asking about for years.

OpenVox is what open source Puppet was always supposed to be: yours.