About Chef Licenses

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All Chef products have a license that governs the entire product, while some have separate licenses for the project source code and the distribution that we build from it. Third-party software included in our distributions may have individual licenses, which are listed in the /opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/LICENSE file. Individual copies of all referenced licenses can be found in the /opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/LICENSES directory.

In April 2019 many of our software distributions switched to being governed under the Chef EULA, while the software projects remained governed by the Apache 2.0 license. To understand which license applies to those distributions, see the versions page. General information about this change can be found in our announcement.

Chef EULA

The commercial distributions of our products—such as Chef Infra Client, Chef Habitat, or Chef InSpec— are governed by either the Chef End User License Agreement (Chef EULA) or your commercial agreement with Chef Software, Inc. as a customer. You are required to accept these terms when using the distributions for the first time. For additional information on how to accept the license, see Accepting the Chef License documentation.

Chef MLSA

Distributions of older proprietary Chef products—such as Chef Automate 1.x and the Chef Management Console—are governed by the Chef Master License and Services Agreement (Chef MLSA), which must be accepted as part of any install or upgrade process.

Apache 2.0

All source code of our open source Chef projects—such as Chef Infra Client, Chef Automate, or Chef InSpec—are governed by the Apache 2.0 license.