Contributors are expected to provide support around the development of a project. Contributors are not expected to provide support for use of the product produced by that project.
Requests for development support include questions such as:
- Why did you choose this Rust crate over this other one?
- Can I get some help understanding what this particular section of code does?
- If I were looking for this functionality in the code, where would I start?
These questions may come in through GitHub, the Community Slack, and other places. Responding to these questions is the duty of the project members, especially Chef employees who are project members.
Request for use of a product support include questions such as:
- How do I use Habitat?
- Why isn't my Chef Cookbook working?
- How would I do this with InSpec?
Commercial customers (with Support contracts) should expect to receive help directly from Chef Software via Support, Customer Architects, etc. The paid Support channel is the only way to receive “official” Chef support from Chef employees on using Chef products. We will provide channels for - and encourage! - external Community members to assist each other. However, there is no expectation of support from Chef on using Chef products without a valid commercial licenses.
If someone requests help for the use of a Product from a Chef Engineer, here is a suggested response.
Thank you for your interest in Chef!
While Chef engineers do provide support with the development of our products, we do not provide direct support for the usage of our products. There are two avenues to get support with using our products - one is through the commercial support channel (which does require a commercial relationship with Chef) at https://www.chef.io/support/get-started/, the other is from other community members through the Community Slack at https://community-slack.chef.io/ or the Discourse Forums at https://discourse.chef.io/. We encourage you to check out one of these resources for support with using Chef products.