About

What’s with the name?

Cinc is a recursive acronym for Cinc Is Not Chef.

Who’s involved?

We’re a small group of people who believe a free distribution of Chef is necessary alongside the commercial Chef product line, now made by Progress Software (which acquired Chef Software in 2020). To stay within the Chef trademark policy, we worked in collaboration with both teams on creating compliant builds of the open-source projects.

The Cinc project is an open community, and we welcome everyone to contribute however they are able. See contributing for details.

The team is listed on the Cinc project group page on GitLab.

Current maintainer

  • Lance Albertson (Ramereth) — primary maintainer; hosting via OSUOSL and pipeline work.

Past major contributors

The Cinc project owes a great deal to its early contributors, who built much of what’s running today:

  • Artem Sidorenko — top early contributor to Cinc Auditor
  • Marc Chamberland (BobChaos) — top early contributor to Cinc Client and Workstation
  • Tensibai — pipeline definitions and initial hosting

Is Cinc compatible with upstream projects?

Yes. Most Cinc projects are built from the exact same code as the upstream projects — only branding constants change. Your Chef Infra™ cookbooks and InSpec profiles work as-is in Cinc Client and Cinc Auditor.

Cinc Workstation and Cinc Server are exceptions: both are now maintained as true forks of their respective upstreams. They remain feature-compatible, but the source is no longer just a re-branding of Chef’s tree — Progress has retired the omnibus build infrastructure for both (Workstation moved to Habitat-only builds, Server is being retired in favor of Chef 360).

Transitioning from a Chef project to a Cinc one (or vice-versa) should be simple and seamless.

How does Cinc ensure compliance with the Chef trademark policy or the quality of the software?

Cinc projects are distributed with no formal warranties or support of any kind.

However, we have actively worked with Progress (formerly Chef Software Inc.) and the Chef community to ensure that we have — to the best of our ability — met the Chef trademark and policy requirements.

You can reasonably expect both compliance and quality with every release of Cinc projects.

If warranties and support are things you need, the Cinc Project recommends contacting Progress directly. We don’t officially offer support, but we’re helpful people — feel free to ask.

Cinc and licensing

The Cinc Project’s stated goal is to provide 100% free distributions of Chef’s open source projects. All our binaries are distributed under Apache 2.0 now, and for as long as the Cinc Project will produce them.

See Goals for more details on our mission statement.

Special thanks to

  • OSUOSL — provides the GitLab CI runners for Linux, Windows, and macOS builds
  • Chef Software (now Progress) — authors and ongoing maintainers of the upstream software; has provided continued guidance to the Cinc Project
  • The Biome team — for their software distribution and advice on how we can improve ours
  • The Chef Community — for support and feedback
  • Jeremy Bingham (ct) — for his Goiardi, support, and feedback