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

[spoogegibbon]

Just download the community version and you get the source code which you can modify to your hearts content under gpl licensing…

If you want professional services and formal support then pony up for a support contract exactly as you would for MySQL, Red Hat and every other enterprise open source vendor.

[heislord5]

If you want someone to support you on community edition, hire an employee!  lol

[vladimirfx]

No it's not OSS. "The Open Source Alternative…" - it's only effective marketing… not more.
Reasons:
1. Source code is CLOSED. We have only dirty HEAD code. Fixes from community as long as fixes from alfresco team is not in HEAD. Community assist to make ENTERPRISE version more stable but this stability inaccessible for community. It's stealing towards us (Community). We help make Alfresco better ECM but only for commecial users.
I have colorful example on statments above: in one of my projtcts I've use Alfresco CE 2.1. After clean install on my portal (liferay 4.2.2) I try to upload some content - exception. 100% reproducable. I search in JIRA and WOW - bug is fixed ONLY for ENTERPRISE (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/AWC-1493).
After that case I've many similar troubls…

2. Developer documentation is inaccessible. See at Spring, Hibernate, Apache projects (all used in Alfresco) - developer documentation is open and absolutly free. In case of Alfresco we have some small wiki articles - not more. Many of them is out of date.

Alfresco it's plain company with beautiful marketing - not more/not less.
Alfresco CE is not intended for production usage! It's my bloody expirience.

P/S: as now my company make investment in Nuxeo EP but Alfresco have many unique futures that we need . On our market (Russia) the cost of Alfresco it too high.

Sorry for bad eng.

[jbarmash]

To me, Open Source does not mean we have to give everything out for free.   We give a lot of code, build by engineers with over 15 years of experience in Content Management, for free.  We also spend months on QAing a version that we support and sell subscriptions for.  That's the one that our partners support as well - it would make no sense for them to work with the community version, since we are already doing the work of stabilizing it. 

To Valdimir's point, We do roll into all the fixes on the ENTERPRISE into the community, but we don't make guarantees as to when that will happen.  Not to intentionally cripple - we are trying to build a business, and paying customers take priority, no matter how strong our commitment to improving community is.  Related to the bug you referenced, the fix went into HEAD 3 DAYS after the fix was made on the ENTERPRISE.  

Here is a great statement by Technical Director of Eclipse Foundation, Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Then there’s also the concept of free as in free choice and one of the things that Eclipse does, which I think is really remarkable is that it allows you to choose whether you want to pay for something or not pay for something. Let me give you the example of support. There are companies in the Eclipse ecosystem that you can pay them to support Eclipse for you or if you choose not to buy support, you could fix the bugs yourself because all of the source code is available or if you choose not to do that, you could submit bugs through Bugzilla to Eclipse and hope the people on the projects fix them. So, you can choose time waiting for people to fix them, you can choose doing it yourself, or you can choose money where you pay someone to do it. So, you have the opportunity to choose which way that’s going to be and I think that’s one of the real powers of open source is that it gives you that choice to how to spend your time and money. It doesn’t force you into a particular vendor’s model of you have to pay for support or you have to wait two years for the next version or whatever it is.”‍‍

A link to the podcast where he said this can be found on my blog - http://nywebguy.com/2008/02/21/insigntful-podcast-on-freedom-in-open-source/. 

If you have ideas of how we could do a better job offering services in Russia, we'd love to hear them.  However, we ARE a company, so making money would have to be part of the equation.  The money goes back to enhance the product - both Community and Enterprise, in addition to things like QA, Product Management, etc - all that benefit the whole Alfresco ecosystem, IMO.

[sdavis]

I understand your frustration and see how some of these conclusions can be drawn.  Hopefully, some extra info will help:

1. Source code is CLOSED. We have only dirty HEAD code. Fixes from community as long as fixes from alfresco team is not in HEAD. Community assist to make ENTERPRISE version more stable but this stability inaccessible for community. It's stealing towards us (Community). We help make Alfresco better ECM but only for commecial users.  I have colorful example on statments above: in one of my projtcts I've use Alfresco CE 2.1. After clean install on my portal (liferay 4.2.2) I try to upload some content - exception. 100% reproducable. I search in JIRA and WOW - bug is fixed ONLY for ENTERPRISE

You are definitely crucial to improving the product!  That's exactly why access to the source is provided (I'm unclear on how we seem closed here; can't get much more open).  You are also correct in that fixes provided by Engineering are typically done on Enterprise first, but that doesn't mean that they are never supplied back to the Community.  Perhaps we need to do a better job communicating when the same fixes are pushed to any / all branches, but don't let the lack of that imply anything else.

2. Developer documentation is inaccessible. See at Spring, Hibernate, Apache projects (all used in Alfresco) - developer documentation is open and absolutly free. In case of Alfresco we have some small wiki articles - not more. Many of them is out of date.

If we had documents hidden away somewhere, I would totally agree with you.  However, that's not the case.  All documentation is freely accessible.  Now, is the existing documentation sufficient?  Not always.  Can it use improvement.  Absolutely.  Again, this is where the Community can assist us.  Update Wikis, contribute great articles like Jeff Potts, etc.  That doesn't mean we expect you guys to do it all – we're also working internally to overhaul some things and will share them when we can.

Alfresco CE is not intended for production usage! It's my bloody expirience.

On this point, I agree with you 100%.  CE never was nor will be intended for Production use - it it intended for the Community as Jean notes above.

[heislord5]

There is still one point that remains and I'm not arguing against Alfresco's model, I'm just saying it is not open source in the normal sense of the word.

Yes, lets assume you merge all fixes to enterprise back into CE.  Before that you merge them into Enterprise right?  Why is Enterprise head not accessible?  Does it cost you any more labor to make that available?  No not at all.  You choose to not make it accessible.  That is what is not open source.  It would require no effort on your part to give everyone read access to the functional head (Enterprise).  You wouldn't have to do any extra support.  All you have to do it make it available and let people pay for support when they want it.  That is how open source works.  This is psuedo open-source.  Kinda open-source.  Half-baked.

Please don't take what I am saying the wrong way.  I am not criticizing your model.  I'm just saying it is not open source.  I would probably not have an open source model either if I were starting a business.

Take Red Hat for instance.  They have fedora which is the equivalent of your CE edition.  BUT they also have Centos which is their enterprise version completely open sourced….with the exception of removal of parts that have outside license restrictions.

[alexander]

I think Alfresco documentation is great - Wiki is best place to find up-2-date info. But sometimes this info relates to unavailable features 🙂 This happened with email integration - config section appeared 3 month before code appeared in the head.

Regarding this one:

CE never was nor will be intended for Production use - it it intended for the Community as Jean notes above.

Do I read it correctly Community = Evaluation. This does not sound too Open Source to me. I agree that paying customers should get priority support and be able to influence road map better, but negligence to community releases will result in serious business loss - loss of the community itself. Value of community sometimes much more then a product.

it is difficult to build successful Open Source business model. Will hope Alfresco with all Open Source bright heads it has will not do obvious mistakes.

[jbarmash]

To Alexander's point about the Wiki:  We have recently gone through all the pages and put Wiki categories on them.  It's still evolving, but the main idea is to tag pages with release numbers better, and to tag the articles that refer to discussions of future products.  

I do want to point out that once we do a Community Release, that does get QA'ed.   It represents a superset of features that will go into Enterprise, and when we stabilize Enterprise version, that gets even more QA and certifications on various platform stacks.  We don't support Community other than through forums, which as you can see, we contribute to actively.  However, our support subscription carries with it dedicated support staff and SLA. 

So I guess I'd amend a previous statement that we don't recommend Community Edition for mission-critical production systems simply because we don't believe that you should run those systems without having support.  That said, our ping logs tell us that there are tens of thousands of community installations out there (we don't have much visibility beyond knowing that they are out there), and we do in fact know of people using Community in production.

[dozyarmadillo]

@heislord5 - CentOS is NOT supported by RedHat. http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=5.