Some time ago I had a task to choose configuration management system for our Linux machines and came to the battle between Salt and Ansible. While technically these systems are similar, licensing models are different. Salt developers chose Apache license and Ansible stopped on GPL one. As a copyleft lover I shouldn't not even think much and Ansible would be my the only choice. However I decided to dig a bit and Google what other people think.
Ideas I keep in mind when I choose software licensed by copyleft license:
- this software is open
- this software will be open forever (or at least for a long period of time)
- developers and users are motivated to contribute
And generally this works for copyleft licensed software, but this is not a rule.
Coming back to Ansible vs Salt I found Salt community extremely active, friendly and welcoming. And this is the most reliable indicator that this piece of software is going to live long and open life. And thus I choose Salt, I choose community and not the license.
Some links to the topic:
http://ryandlane.com/blog/2014/08/04/moving-away-from-puppet-saltstack-or-ansible/
http://jensrantil.github.io/salt-vs-ansible.html
