Alfresco vs Nuxeo : True Open Source

[heislord5]

I am a Documentum developer and would like to possibly consider learning and promoting adoption of Alfresco, but I have a few problems/questions.

1) I'm trying to decide between Alfresco and Nuxeo.  Alfresco seems to have more momentum (pardon the Documentum pun) in US, but at least Nuxeo is fully Open Source, meaning all the source including bug fixes that have not been included in a release are always available.  Having worked with Documentum, I can imagine that it becomes easy, maybe even profitable to provide releases that are rushed, and then quickly provide bug fixes afterward that are not available to the community.  Hiding any of the code, even if it is bug fixes just doesn't seem like true open source to me.  This seems to provide an incentive to provide a continuously broke release with fixes already being packaged to be released a few weeks later to the paying customers.

2) How would someone like myself, who is a Documentum developer, get the supported versions of Alfresco without paying a bunch of money.  My goal would be to create interest in Alfresco and promote it.  How can alfresco do that in an Open Source way, if the developers who need to be promoting the application to companies don't have access to bug fixes when they become available?

3) Other than market exposure, and give the fully Open approach of Nuxeo, why would someone choose Alfresco instead?

[pmonks]

Alfresco has full visibility into all commits (to both the labs and enterprise branches) so this is unlikely to become an issue in practice.  On top of this, bug fixes are merged into the labs branch soon* after being fixed in enterprise, so the window between a fix being made and it appearing in the labs branch is usually small (typically of the order of days, although as with anything there are outlyers), further reducing the chances of this kind of conflict occurring in practice.

* where "soon" is defined to be "as soon as is possible, given the the engineers' workload" - it's in no one's interest for the labs and enterprise code bases to diverge too far, so there's a natural incentive to merge bug fixes across as quickly as circumstances allow.

Cheers,
Peter

[paulhh]

It is worth making one thing very clear: if someone from the Community contributes a fix or a feature, that goes into the Community code first.  Always.

We don't hide what fixes have been made in the Enterprise maintenance releases and they always get into the Community code.  However, in the real world, where we are paying full-time, world-class developers we obviously have to concentrate on the commitments we make to people that pay for our Enterprise support and maintenance.  If we don't, there will be no continually growing Alfresco.  Look at the speed of development of most open source projects that are done by people who are not on it full-time and you'll see that it's usually glacial.  You want to have your cake and eat it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_one%27s_cake_and_eat_it_too) for your "true" open source.

I think you'll see with the new application and framework that is coming with 3.0 that there will be much easier ways for people to contribute functionality and components without being Java gurus.  The easier it is for more people to implement extensions, the more will become available to the Community.

Paul.

[kurtkbee]

Come on, this is a bit cheeky - that sounds like an advert for Nutseo on our forums.  Good luck with it, we have *no* worries about them.  We're completely open about our model and it is open source. 

Paul.

In retrospect i believe that it was wrong to make such grandiose statements about Nuxeo, frankly i have not used their product and i am sure it has its own ills. I did however state/imply that Alfresco is much more mature and I also (at the risk of sounding overly sycophantic) I believe it has an excellent engineering team.

My company likes Alfresco and while our initial pilot deployment was marred with problems (due to the instability of the HEAD branch code, the only branch available) we liked what we were able to do in/with the product, except for the obvious lack of support for 21CFR Part 11 style sign/approve and sign/reject and the absence of this feature on the published Roadmap (if/when we do purchase Alfresco there will have to be guarantees that 21CFR Part 11 is fully supported).

So maybe my not too subtle attempt at bringing to light my desires has only served to get the attention and raise the ire of a developer, but I would think that these are important issues being raised in this thread (also on slashdot) and while it maybe fine to say "feel free to move on to competitor X" I would think that a better approach would be to see if there are concerns that are of merit in the community that are worth investigating regarding licensing (ok, in my case features also).
I recently had this discussion with a senior member of the Compiere product group about the lack of product/documentation openness (unlike Alfresco there was no active "community") and this resulted in users migrating to other solutions and a fracturing of the community/product, they have since adopted a more open/transparent process.

The truth is, with the nature and complexity of ERPs (in the case of Compiere) and ECMs (i.e. holding valuable customer data) a user/company cannot afford downtime or outages and for that matter data-loss. These are products of information aggregation and all but the small mom and pop businesses will think twice about deploying these platforms without support contract.
So my argument is that Alfresco Inc. should listen to the concerns/rants and if possible offer solutions that are long term beneficial to the company and the testers/users (of the opensource version).

-Kurt
P.s. Also add 21CFR-P11 support to the roadmap !

[dave_whyte]

Can I also add that while I see a lot of mention about access to code but not about stability releases

Can I refer you to
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=14330&p=47380&hilit=Stable+Version#p47380

Now I really like the essence of that post - community support is going to get better - but it clearly is not good at the moment - apparently there has not been a "stable" release since 2.1 and there have not been any patches to the 2.1 release.

Supporting paying customers understandably takes a priority - but there are bugs in 2.1 that are causing me trouble and I can vouch for the instability of the more recent community releases.

[mjasay]

I would like to say that i am impressed with Alfresco and it is the most feature rich (also has far more developers). However there is a growing sentiment that it is not truly operating like an open source company with regards to code access and transparency and it is something that i believe will cause people to migrate to other solutions even less mature than Alfresco.

That would be unfortunate.  It would also be foolish, IMHO.  There are two good reasons that Nuxeo is not as good as Alfresco, and likely never will be:

1.  It doesn't have engineers with as much talent and experience in ECM as Alfresco has.
2.  It doesn't have a business model that will allow it to scale to the demanding enterprise requirements for which companies use Alfresco.

I understand that you would like to have Alfresco give you 100% of its code, 100% of the time, for 100% no cost.  Believe me, I'd love the same thing from Apple: my Mac for free, plus all the software for free.

But don't you think it's fair to pay for value you receive from Alfresco?  Let's face it: you are unlikely to contribute any code back to Alfresco.  You're also clearly unlikely to contribute any cash back to Alfresco (or Nuxeo, for that matter).  Why is it wrong for a company to seek to find ways to give ever-increasing amounts of code away for free, but also find ways to charge prospective customers for value received?