100% Open Source Alfresco including Enterprise Features

[johnn]

Open source as a business model is still evolutionary and it is true for Alfresco too. Having had an opportunity to distribute and sell services to enterprise customers, we have come to the conclusion it is not necessary to withhold functionality to have enterprises invest in services and support. Therefore, we are considering making Alfresco, including Enterprise features, 100% open source in the 1.3 Release of Alfresco in May. There will still be an Enterprise service package that includes support, maintenance, additional documentation, indemnification and warranty.

We would like your help as we consider this initiative in positioning and in branding. If you could take a moment to take our poll, we would appreciate your input. Also, if you have any comments we would love to hear them.

-John Newton, CTO

[manuelgentile]

It's the right way!

Good Work!

[mattruby]

It just gets better and better with you guys!!

My 2cents: Why not just go with Alfresco?  If there are no functional differences, why push multiple brands/products?

[hamptont]

Why wait until 1.3 ?    Make 1.2 Enterprise available !!!

I can't use the Open Source version of Alfresco 1.2 because I need to be able to cluster Alfresco on multiple JBoss servers.  This is a show stopper for me and I am starting to explore products to replace Alfresco.  I'm required to use Open Source products for the work I am doing and Alfresco is useless to me without clustering & LDAP support.

I hope you choose to make the full functionality of Alfresco available in Open Source, but I don't believe I'll be able to wait until May to get this.

Tom Hampton
Technical Lead & Architect, ERIC BRC
http://www.ericbrc.org
thomas_hampton@sra.com

[kevinr]

It just gets better and better with you guys!!

My 2cents: Why not just go with Alfresco?  If there are no functional differences, why push multiple brands/products?

I was also wondering about just "Alfresco" as the open source name - it's the name people have come to know and love after all and "Alfresco Certified" or similar for the certified stack version.

Cheers,

Kevin

[mattruby]

Again, just my opinion here but, I thought from this post that Alfresco was moving toward one stack.   Won't all major releases be certifiable?  If so, why not just go with Alfresco accross the board.  It has that nice ring to it…  Alfresco…  smoooooth…

Regardless of the name, I think you guys are doing an amazing job.

[nico]

I would also go for just "Alfresco".

This is really great news, because a CMS without groups or clustering is not really interesting…

[michaelh]

This is the best news after the one concerning the Alfresco project launch

I have no doubt it will helps a lot in "propagating" Alfresco to a large scope of  users, and I really hope this choice will help you in making benefits from your hard work !

I have to admit I don't have any idea concerning the vote you propose to us …

None of the proposals sounds attractive to me

Perhaps "Alfresco" is not available to make it available for a commercial use by your company, and it's normal.

What about something like "Alfresco content management" ? ("Keep it simple" way of naming)

It permits many evolution while continuing to be true : web content, enterprise content, documents content, and so … (and the final goal remains possible : managing the whole universe content ).

Anyway, your decision is really a good thing, and I would like to thank you again !

M

[rdanner]

All of the suggested name implies a difference to me – they all sound like names used by companies like sugar that withhold functionality.

It sounds like a number of people here prefer just "Alfresco"

I like the Alfresco moniker by itself as well because it doesn?t imply a difference in the software functionality (I can't read in to it).  The support/Doc/etc needs a good branding.

One quick question: 
Alfreso has several targets WCM, DM, RM etc

Are these going to be packaged separately and if so how are they going to be branded.  In that case is the Alfresco moniker an umbrella moniker like Apache?  Better to think of this upfront. I think the Apache foundation missed the boat with the whole Jakarta rebranding and what not… People were lost for a moment there, and even to day we don?t say Apache HTTPD we just say Apache. 

I am not a marketing guy… I know jack about marketing but if you have to rebrand later I know enough to know its disruptive.

[fcorneli]

I definitively think opening up the Enterprise code is the only right move.
Even "big" companies like J&J are frantically looking for Open Source systems to replace the existing infrastructure (Linux, Eclipse, …)

…But without a support model, it is hard to introduce it in a company.

We would certainly take an in-depth look to replace our current global Document Management System (you know which, John  :wink: )