Alfresco Labs 3 Beta is Here!

[nancyg]

All,

Everyone around Alfresco has been hard at work over the past several months on our latest release, Labs 3. We invite you to download it, kick the tires and send us your feedback.

You can find a lot of info in the wiki, the starting page is http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Labs_3, a list of features is at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Labs_3_Feature_List and the download and install instructions at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Labs_3. You can read what John Newton, our co-founder and CTO, has to say on his blog, http://newton.typepad.com/content/2008/07/introducing-alf.html.

Enjoy the new release and stay tuned for more exciting developments!

Nancy

[stk137]

Alfresco community is just a marketing game.

lets see, first it was stable subset of the enterprise edition
then it was almost equal to the enterprise edition
now it's an unstable mess
(not mention they changed licenses once already)

Ironically, this shifty, untrustworthy approach is one of the things that keeps me from recommending commiting any money to Alfresco(TM). 

One sad thing about them using "Community Open Source" b.s. as marketing is that it has helped stifle genuinely open source CMS development in Java.  That along with similar strategies with Day and Magnolia.  I am not saying it's making it impossible, but it has to be a factor in the dearth of genuinely open, Java based alternatives to Plone, Drupal, etc.

When there's a single commercial entity in sole control over an entire project, you can't trust it to remain open source or be developed in a genuinely open fashion.  The definition of "open source" needs to evolve to take this into consideration.  Without some foundation like Apache, Eclipse, Dojo, etc, "open source" isn't much different than "shared source".  Alfresco could cease to release their software as GPL at any moment and while you would have the source you paid for, you alone wouldn't be able to establish the community necessary to maintain it and move it forward and the GPL prevents it from being adopted by existing foundations like Apache.

[stk137]

Just getting the SVN is not going to solve this problem

so it would require something more like CentOS, where customers get the GPL'd code, removes trademarks and re-releases.

[vsuarez]

Can a enterprise customer get the source code of its Enterprise Edition and then public/release that source code?

If the answer is "YES", then Alfresco Enterprise Edition is open source. If the answer is "NO", then Alfresco Enterprise Edition is NOT open source. If the answer is YES, some community members could collect founds to buy a license and then release the code and create a truly-stable community version (this has already done in some projects, and the licenser didn't complain).

Another question: is possible to access to a SVN branch with previous-merge changes into Labs Edition branch?

Really I am wondering if is worth testing a version that won't ever show me the whole functionality because I will always be a beta-tester and I will never be payed nor returned with a stable version. If I collaborate, all my time will be spent for improving a close source product.

[callermd]

The enterprise code is not licensed under GPL so you can't simply buy a license and release it.

Anyways,  we are probably going to look for another document management software instead of upgrading to Enterprise because of the bad taste left in our mouth by what seems to be a "bait and switch" move by Alfresco.

[jonluk]

We are new comers to this community. We have just installed Share and found it to be so buggy as to be useless as a trial product at this stage. We have changed Linux server types and a number of other things to try to get it working enough so that we can properly trial it as a potential system to be used by a larger client we have.

I was looking forward to our people participating in this systems future, for now we will check out some other options and watch with interest how Alfresco develops. Seems after discussions on this topic we should just wait for the Enterprise release and treat it as any other document management product.

To say that the open source community can download a beta version only and trial it to help turn it onto something our Enterprise customers will buy… really… who's going to bother. What's the point of anyone using an open source or any other system that doesn't have a stable version available for trial.

I hope Alfresco doesn't waste the open source advantage they have gained.

[mliedtke]

Not sure if this thread is still being monitored, but I have a couple questions.

1.  In looking at the road map (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Roadmap#Alfresco_Labs_3:__Planned_September.2C__2008), It mentions the preview release that was release July 31, and it mentions another release (I'm  guessing a more stable release) for September.  When is the September release planed?

2. Is there an upgrade path from 2.1 to 3.0?


Thanks,
Mark

[unknown-user]

I am in the same boat. To trial the software and really put it through it's paces means to have it installed for a longer term than the trial of 30 days. 30 days is not enough time to try out various scenarios and do any custom code work, before expiry.

I was looking at this product to use within an initiative within the current project I am involved with, but due to the inability of even being able to upload a document to the repository, I don't get a warm fuzzy feeling. This has caused me to look at other products that have a good price point, and also provides a stable free release for trial and customization testing.

Good luck on this model

[unknown-user]

Anybody know if workflow support (Document Approval, FYI etc.) will be there in Alfresco Labs 3.0 "Share" version that is due to be out in September 2008?

[lakshya]

Hi,
From where I can download the source code for Alfresco Enterprise ed 3 ?

Regards

[mikeh]

http://www.alfresco.com/products/networks/compare/