About Chef Licenses

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All Chef products have a license that governs the entire product and includes links to license files for any third-party software included in Chef packages. The /opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/LICENSES directory contains individual copies of all referenced licenses.

Apache 2.0

All open source Chef products—such as the Chef client, the Chef server, or InSpec—are governed by the Apache 2.0 license.

Chef MLSA

Proprietary Chef products—such as Chef Automate 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.

Accept the Chef MLSA

There are three ways to accept the Chef MLSA:

  1. When running chef-<PRODUCT-NAME>-ctl reconfigure the Chef MLSA is printed. Type yes to accept it. Anything other than typing yes rejects the Chef MLSA and the upgrade process will exit. Typing yes adds a .license.accepted file to the /var/opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/ directory. As long as this file exists in this directory, the Chef MLSA is accepted and the reconfigure process will not prompt for yes.
  2. Run the chef-<PRODUCT-NAME>-ctl reconfigure command using the --accept-license option. This automatically types yes and skips printing the Chef MLSA.
  3. Add a .license.accepted file to the /var/opt/<PRODUCT-NAME>/ directory. The contents of this file do not matter. As long as this file exists in this directory, the Chef MLSA is accepted and the reconfigure process will not prompt for yes.