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A developer of some Ruby Gems pulled the code as a statement against certain entities (Department of Homeland Security — DHS) ultimately using the code. Chef gets owned in the process.
ZDNet has a good rundown of the incident:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/developer-takes-down-ruby-library-after-he-finds-out-ice-was-using-it/
It seems that developers at chef may have used an old copy of the dev's code to get things back up and running again, which seems like exactly the wrong approach.
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Political Statement Takes Down Chef
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven;
confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday September 22 2019, @08:15PM
No. When you download anything under BSD or GPL, you are, in effect, licensing it. You don't even have to run it. Just downloading the code is copying which puts the data transaction under IP transfer laws and copyrights specifically. So, if your government decided to allow software patents, you also need a patent disclaimer or you'll end up fucked by the likes of Microsoft even if it's GPL. This is why GNUPG doesn't support RSA or IDEA as they're patented. And if the government decides to sanction, say, Iran, by banning IP transfers, American businesses can't legally offer or use software from or to Iranian businesses and citizens even if it's "free". You can ask Huawei for how that works.
There's also liability issues that some licenses may fail to account for similar to how automobile and medical equipment manufacturers can't put a disclaimer on their products. For instance, privacy laws in the EU led to heavy fines being imposed on Facebook and Google over the tracking they perform despite notifying their users and offering the software free and open. The US is currently looking at even more serious actions including breaking them apart since it's clear their legal teams will drag the issue in courts otherwise.
Then you have legal restrictions on radio equipment with regards to accessing certain bands that may or may not limit some products from have an open source baseband or encryption export restrictions.
There's also limits on software penetration tools sales which is why they're chiefly traded in the dark web.
So no. It's not by any person for any purpose. Not from the suppliers end for certain. But on on the receiving end either.
compiling...