Is Alfresco a real Open Source?

[edless]

Certified Alfresco Partners only offer Level 1 Support, Consulting, Integration or Training on either the Alfresco Enterprise.

Open source was born to give people the possibility to share knowledge and expertise.

Why Alfresco is giving just to big company the possibility to be supported  on the product? Why I can't pay a Alfresco Partner just to support me on a community version, without asking any guaranty?

ED

[heislord5]

I didn't say it was supported….I said it is available.  Enterprise Alfresco is NOT available.  Enterprise Red Hat is available as Centos.

[alexander]

Jean

I agree regarding releases.

2.1 CE release was great. But my experience with 2.9 is not positive at all.

I cant tell if opening Enterprise code (without licensing module) is good idea. I am working for a Partner and this is our bread too.

But my experience is that companies that run mission-critical will anyway buy support, no matter what quality of code is, and those who can only use free Open Source will never pay (just because they never do that). But they will definitely put demerits on Alfresco for broken releases.

It is painful to see when Alfresco quality is marked less then MOSS, no matter if we understand that evaluators used wrong "wrong edition".

Thanks
Alexander

[sdavis]

Excellent feedback!  Candor is always appreciated - if for no other reason than it shows we all want Alfresco to succeed.  Thanks for the input.  It's been shared internally.

[whoami]

Thanks for the input.

I am totally new to Alfresco, just saw it yesterday for the very first time, so forgive my ignorance. Looks like a good thing at first sight. but…….

Well, I used to use Fedora and I dumped it, I am not Linus Torvald and don't need to twinker around with operating systems or anything else. Then I used RedHat Enterprise Linux and I dumped it because I found out that I could get CentOS for free. I don't need any support, so what do I need RedHad Enterprise Linux for. Then I found Ubuntu and dumped even CentOS. I don't need a copy of something if I can have an original. I think that Ubuntu has the right Open Source model. Take the whole thing for free and if you need support then buy it, if not, then no need to. The Ubuntu model will succeed, the other I am not so sure about.

What do you say, my friends?

[whoami]

What do you say, my friends?

No answer is always a good answer.
Thank you my friends, I won't be coming back, wish you good luck with your "Open Source" model.

[dmatejka]

Hello Alfresco engeneers,
just want to ask.. did you ever consider small companies, that do not have enough money to pay for Eterprise Edition, but could grow on your Alfresco CE as a potential market?

It it also our case when we have a plenty of ideas where alfresco could be a great oportunity for us to grow, but without a stable edition we cannot provide services to our customers based on alfresco.

We would be pretty happy to pay for to support and buy an enterprise edition when the business starts to grow and earn some money, but we will not get there if our products (based on alfresco CE) will not be stable.

I do not want to criticize your work or your way of doing busiess.. just want to add one more thing to consider….

[jerico_dev]

Hi!

Full community commitment IS about earning money. Network economics simply doesn't allow for a halfway model in the long run. It seems that there are some people at Alfresco who really believe that an open source software business gains its most valuable resources from customers rather than from the network… Funny. There is nothing more short-lived than customer and investor cash once the network breaks away. Customers follow the network and not the other way round! 😞

There has been a discussion on slashdot some time ago that reaches very similar conclusions about Alfresco's business model as those drawn by others in this thread:

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=597833&cid=23991861

This discussion raised some interesting questions. They are not meant to be rethorical… I'd love to get a statement from Alfresco about them:

It's just very rational to close the source "a little" as long as you have a first-mover advantage. You'd be crazy to not reap that value from your customers as long as you can. But if you deeply believed that community value will always remain second to customer value then we all have to fear that you'll go out of business within the next couple of years.

Like some of the slashdot people I think there is a real risk that some well-funded Ubuntu-like sponsor steps in and forges a stable version of Alfresco. That would be nice for the community but disastrous for Alfresco. Within no time you might find yourself to the "relatively closed" side of the ECM market and loose your "valuable" customers and control over your software even more quickly than you gained them. That's what happened to Alfresco's competitors. That's what's happening to non-free "Enterprise Release" models in the Linux market.

IMO you are too open to keep others from "eating your cake" - you are however not open enough to frighten others away. Now that you have prepared the open source ECM market, it could be the right time for somebody else to take over a good part of it.

Well, whatever you do, I think thanks to Alfresco the community is on the winning side anyway. We might all whine about how much more open Alfresco could be. But if we look at how closed this market was just three years ago then we have to be really grateful!! 🙂

Florian

[dave_whyte]

I am working on an idea that is in the embryonic stage - that is there is no income, no funding - just an idea.

Alfresco looked like it would be the ideal product to make something real out of the idea - but the instability of 2.1 community, 2.9 B and 3labs is proving a real road block and time waster.  We strike a bug in 2.1 CE, it is fixed in later versions and in 2.1 Enterprise.  We strike different bugs in 2.9B.
:evil:
I see Alfresco compared to Red Hat quite often - but I think that they do not compare well.

Fedora does not have anything like the stability problems that I have struck with Alfresco.  Bugs in Fedora are often fixed after a version is released.  When looking for stability, all a user of Fedora needs to do is use an older version where all the main bugs have been ironed out.   From what I can tell, Alfresco never irons out the bugs of a released version, but builds the fixes into the next version.  So the bugs may get fixed, but always in a new version that introduces new bugs.  From what I can tell, if someone wants patches for a released version, they need to get the Enterprise Version.  Fedora is much much better.

Another Red Hat product is JBoss.  The Community version of JBoss is absolutely stable - it is really very good - and it gets patched!  Some things require a proprietary license , such as X509 support on AIX, but for the other scenarios, the community version is very good.  I can assure you that if the community version of JBoss were unstable, they would sell less Enterprise versions.  Developers like to try things out, and then they go on to influence enterprise/commercial decisions.  Evaluation periods are just not good enough!  Check out their downloads page, I see the word stable mentioned a lot! http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/downloads/ 

It takes time to build any idea into something makes enough money to afford an enterprise license!

Often Open Source companies patch the enterprise version weeks ahead of the community version, and that is OK - but forgive me if I think that the community versions still need to get patched.

[dmatejka]

Thank you for clarifing it Luis..  I was really waiting for this..
"Marking" experimental/new/unstable is really an excellent idea!

[dave_whyte]

Luis

I really appreciate that you took the time to respond to my post - but I hope that you understand that I am feeling less than happy at the moment.

Right now I am in the frustrating situation where I cannot even get Alfresco working long enough to start learning how to use the WCM features.  Which version should I be using for this purpose?  Is there any version of  Alfresco WCM out there where I can assume that if it does not work, it is likely my fault?

You are saying that 3c should be relatively stable - it will be similar to a release candidate for 3 enterprise.  And 3d will be a stability release, which is fantastic.  All this means for me is that I will need to wait for 3d before I have a release of Alfresco that in the normal course of events would be called stable.  I may be mistaken, but i understand that it will be months before 3d is released.

I have a few issues with this scenario
  -   There is still no currently "Stable" release of Alfresco for the community - 2.1 Community is not stable as it has significant known bugs which are only fixed in the Enterprise Version.  As mentioned above - it is my understanding that it will be months more before there is a stable release.
  -   It has been more than a year since 2.1 community was released.
  -   Your own post refers another big concern I have - while every new release of community in the past has had stability and bug fixes, each release has also had new code introduced creating more problems.  In your own words "The 2.9 branch was a throwaway of sorts and wasn't stabilized enough to justify a final release so it should be ignored."  When release 3d is released - will there only be stability and bug fixes?  Will a stable and maintained community release be made available on an ongoing basis?
  -   One of the things any potential user of Alfresco will want to be able to do is to try out this great new Application - and many may have been put off by the quality of the community versions.  Shall I point out all the forum posts that say something like "don't worry - that bug in 2.1 is fixed in 2.9"?

As a hypothetical person wishing to try out Alfresco - without having to put up with a bleeding edge release - I would naturally avoid the "beta" 3 labs and go for the previous release - which would be 2.9!