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

[cstrom]

Is there a time line for these micro-installation licenses? I really think it could be a huge success. We have a few clients who would be interested.

Secondly, I think you need to consider putting some more work into having stable community releases. There have been a lot of bugs the last year in labs, and it is not good for business for anyone. Many companies want to start off with labs and "upgrade" to enterprise once the product has proven itself over some time. Having to push for an enterprise subscription in an early stage makes it so much more difficult.

Thanks,

C-J

[mjasay]

Wow, Steve, not cool.  It is shockingly bad form to quote a personal email sent to you.  Who gave you that right?  You should be ashamed of yourself.  It shows a lack of integrity.  You owe me an apology.

It has long been unclear to me why you have taken on this crusade against Alfresco, but frankly, I don't care very much.  You have the source code.  You paid nothing for it.  What do you feel you are missing?  A personal assistant to compile it for you?

Would you be happier if we added proprietary extensions or add-ons like Zimbra, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, JBoss, Hyperic, IBM, Openbravo, MySQL, etc. etc. etc.?  We may well, but for the moment you have all of our code, and you're complaining???

You have made your point here, as well as in several emails to Alfresco executives and employees, and guess what?  We're going to keep doing what we've been doing: deliver great software for exactly $0.00.  Your complaints have been noted.  If you prefer to use a different open-source project, please do.  If you want to use Alfresco, please do.  But please don't post personal emails here, and please don't continue to complain that you've been misused because you got $19 million (the venture capital we've raised to this point) worth of software development for $0.00. 

By the way, when were you planning to contribute something back to Alfresco?  You have decided that we're not open source enough, but I can't seem to find your contributions to Alfresco or any other open-source community, beyond forum posts. 

Matt

[mjasay]

Secondly, I think you need to consider putting some more work into having stable community releases. There have been a lot of bugs the last year in labs, and it is not good for business for anyone. Many companies want to start off with labs and "upgrade" to enterprise once the product has proven itself over some time. Having to push for an enterprise subscription in an early stage makes it so much more difficult.

CJ:  Good points, but you can also participate by contributing code/bug fixes to make these Labs releases more stable.  It's a two-way street and we'd love to have you more involved.  To the extent that people wait on Alfresco to do the QA/testing, you'll always be somewhat at the mercy of our internal schedule.  Why not contribute and make the schedule, rather than wait on it?  We'd love to have more community involvement in the QA process.

[jerico_dev]

Hi Luis, hi Alfresco community,

After so much talking about whether Alfresco is open enough or not I'd rather like to do something about it and let the community decide whether they are really willing and able to do it better…

I am planning to set up a sourceforge project, independently branded, synchronize the Alfresco public subversion into it (after stripping off proprietary brand names) and start tagging the 2.1 and 3.0 releases. We (the community) will then easily be able to apply patches selectively to get the stable community version we all long for. We don't even need to buy an enterprise release. As Luis and the others have repeated often enough: Everything is in the repository (with some time lag of course). Someone just has to split it up into stable branches. Of the 3000+ commits we'll only need to see through a smaller part to find the patches we look for. A co-ordinated group of a few voluntary community developers could do this within no time.

I'd really like to try this out. But I obviously cannot do it alone. I am asking those who spoke up in this thread: Are you willing to join forces and provide stable code branches as well as community support for it? I am willing to contribute my part and co-ordinate efforts. I am also willing to contribute anything back to Alfresco that might be achieved through such a project (patches, addons, etc.).

In fact, that is exactly what CentOS Linux is. The CentOS guys have purchased a subscription to RHEL which permits them to access the code and they then strip out all the Red Hat branding (which is trademarked by Red Hat) then rebuild and distribute freely. One can, if they wish, do the same with Alfresco.

I also ask Luis: Did you really mean this? If the community did something like that will Alfresco not try to sue them in any way? Will they not try to find anything to hamper such activities? (We may and will do our best to respect Alfresco's IP rights but if you pay enough lawyers they'll always find something to pressurize…) On the other hand: Does Alfresco maybe even have an interest in the community taking over a more active part in maintining a community version? At least this could save you real money and get you even more free development advances…

Those who are interested may contact me here on this forum or in private: as you prefer.

Jerico

PS: Luis, you hopefully see that I am not having any secret plans. I am really trying to do this openly and get Alfresco involved as much as possible. The only thing I'll do from here is contacting those who posted in this thread with personal mails. Just to make sure they are aware of my initiative. Otherwise I'll await feedback on this thread.

[fselendic]

I'm not sure that Alfresco is strong enough to be able to survive RH/CentOS model (which works surprisingly well). But I do think Alfresco will have to do something about community version and community involvement. Decision to leave community without stable version for over a year will come back to haunt you guys. Just like one that micro-installations are not profitable.

[dmatejka]

Dear jerico.dev,
sorry that I answer to your private mail here in the public forum, but I really need to show support to the alfresco people… I have been closely watching their product for more than a year… and they have done amazing piece of work. Yes, there was a lot of "WOWs" and "Ohhhhs" going on in the forum… last few months community seems to be disappointed about the stability of the latest version… on the other hand there seems to be few people on the alfresco side sick of people who do not give them credit they deserve,.. I do understand both points of view.

I as a community member want the product easily installable, easily customizable and for free  :wink:  …I as the owner of a company can see how much they put into this.. how much they risk… and they have all my respect that I can give.

Yes I'm also very frustrated that after a year of trying we still do not have any "stable" production version of the system running, but concerning the fact that we do not have any developer in-house and there are only two people {manager, and system administrator} actively involved in "developing" or let's say "installing" the product… we have achieved project that we (as such a small company) would not be able even to dream of…

They have done A LOT last year.. whole product has changed.. and now it is ready to become a GREAT COMMUNITY -DRIVEN, open-source, Content Management System
I think it would be really unfair to "steel" this project at this point…

In my opinion, we, as a community owe them little more time.. I'm sure these people are willing and will find the way how do the community branch stable enough to make community happy and do not spend too much money on it - so it is economically feasible.

I would rather ask the community to support them and show them we can do something for the product.. I see the Share and the framework around as a wonderful way how the community can really be the "engine" of the future evolving of the product…

OF course I want the "stable" edition as soon as possible, but as I understand there is few thousands of Alfresco LAB edition out there and they are working.. so it is not only alfresco fault that we (some of us) do not have enough knowledge to install it and deploy it…

Yes, they should make it "easier" for us to do it … On the other hand I understand the economical aspect of each decision they have to do,.. there are only limited resources available and these resources must produce enough to make this happen,…. they have done a lot… let's give them little more time and help them to find the right way (win-win solution) how to make both sides happy.

[vsuarez]

If the branching succeeds I'd be concerned about the effect such a "schism" would have as it has the potential of splitting the community in half.

Mmmmmh… I sincerely think the community won't be split in half, I actually think the whole community will go behind the new developing branch.

Luis, note that there wasn't improvements in the community/labs edition in a year and a half (since Alfresco 2.1 CE); a whole year was spent contributing code, helping in the forums, filling bugs without the correspondent feedback to community. If a strong initiative starts now and forces an Alfresco fork, Alfresco, sadly, will lose almost all the community support.

I hope this can be re-conduced towards normality, but Alfresco must be clear with the community and more respectful with the support that the community offers.

I still think Alfresco 2.1 CE is one of the better open source products, with the best features and documentation, and very stable solution for small-medium enterprises, not so Alfresco Enterprise (it's not clear to me if is open source, shared source o closed source yet). A3B is a real nightmare.

And thank you again Luis. You are, almost, the unique brave voice in this forum from Alfresco, and always correct.

Sincerely,
Víctor

[jerico_dev]

Hi dmatejka,

Dear jerico.dev,
sorry that I answer to your private mail here in the public forum

That's completely ok! There was nothing private about my message. That's why I did a public post in the forum /first/ and only after that pointed some of you guys to the post by private message. I just wanted to make sure that you were aware of my initiative. There is no "hidden agenda" at all on my side. If you like you can publish the full text I wrote to you and the others (which is the same to the point).

In my opinion, we, as a community owe them little more time.. I'm sure these people are willing and will find the way how do the community branch stable enough to make community happy and do not spend too much money on it - so it is economically feasible.

I'd be very happy if Alfresco stopped my initiative before it even starts by providing a stable version to the community. This would save me quite some effort. I however think that /so far/ it was not a matter of time but of business strategy that Alfresco didn't provide a stable community version. If Alfresco was willing to publish its stable branches then they could do this within hours rather than days. It just takes the time to synchronize their internal subversion server with their public repository (or one on sourceforge). Sorry, I don't understand your "more time" argument. I think it's a little naive to think that Alfresco is trying hard to do different. I think they know exactly what they are doing (and they've been right so far!).

If, however, Alfresco maintains its current business policy and /if/ the community gains the momentum to provide a stable community version themselves (which I am not yet sure about) then I think that everybody (including Alfresco) will gain a lot. I am a strong believer in the creativity and momentum of a good open source community. If you read my earlier posts then you'll see that I as well fully respect how Alfresco is transforming a whole industry and continues to do so. But I'd prefer to see a "friendly community" as ours publishing a stable branch rather than one of Alfresco's competitors!

After all I'd never try to "fork" Alfresco. I'd just provide a repackaged and re-branded version of Alfresco's own public subversion server. If we feed back all that gets contributed and keep both organizations in good sync then Alfresco will be even faster to leave their competitors behind.

Whatever happens, I am sure that there'll be no "schism" in the Alfresco community if we don't fork. Such a "schism" would be contrary to all I am interested in.

Jerico

[vsuarez]

Thanks to both Victor and dmajetka for your encouraging words. There's much we can all do together to improve the community/labs version. I believe that both the product, the company and the community are close to reaching the next stage in their respective evolution. I think good communication will be key to seeing this new phase through.

Don't mention it

Victor:
I'm curious what it is that you've been experiencing with 3b that's causing you trouble you didn't see in 2.1 Community. Excluding Share, about the only thing I can think of is WCM. There were a few changes to WCM that were introduced in 3 that we later found a few issues with. These affect both Labs and Enterprise and we're working on correcting them for both releases.

Introduction: I'm working with Alfresco in integration projects, some of them with an interesting size, where the openness of the code is a requisite. I install Alfresco in HA, and the 2.1 CE is problematic version in this area, but we have got to work with it with some modifications through configuration that surely are available in Enterprise Edition (thanks Spring and Alfresco extensible model). SOAP services are very important in these projects.

Now some problems: web interface with failures in javascript rutines; rules that are not propagated as usually was; multivalued properties; weird behavior in WebDAV/CIFS interfaces… sufficient to avoid more lost of time and resources. 2.1 simply works. "Share" is not important for me (now).

And as I said in previous posts, I won't collaborate with Alfresco to help to improve firstly the Enterprise Edition and then, a year later, improve the Labs Edition plus new B (for beta/buggy) features. Because of that, I'm not spending very much time in the 3.0 version. Excuse me for that, but now I am only trying to help other people in the Web Services Forum and concentrating my very limited free time in other open source projects.

And thank you very much for your attention.
Víctor

[jerico_dev]

Hi Víctor!

Mmmmmh… I sincerely think the community won't be split in half, I actually think the whole community will go behind the new developing branch.

I'm also very sure that the community won't split. Even if some contributed here and others there it wouldn't matter when we re-sync our results regularly. And I guarantee that I'd be doing nothing else!

Again: I am not after a fork but after a re-packaging of existing public source to make stable branches available to the community. If Alfresco decides to further close down their source after this initiative then we might have to fork if we want to maintain a community ECM. But I don't think that such a thing will happen. It would probably drive Alfresco out of business in the long run as it will take their most valuable marketing instrument away from them (apart from them loosing their credibility as a reliable business partner).

But even if such an evil thing happened we'd at least know what we have to think of Alfresco. As I am planning an ECM project myself, this would give me an early indicator that I should better not rely on Alfresco.

But let's not think such horrible things. Alfresco has been /very/ reliable so far. Luis' quick response, well-founded arguments and honesty proves this once again.

Jerico