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

[jerico_dev]

Now, I would like to ask if the third version (LABS/3) of Alfresco is based on the entreprise edition of Alfresco 2 or also the C.E. edition.
So, are the bugless codes in the second EE version integrated in the third C.E. (LABS)?

The process as I understand it is like this:
1) Whenever a developer has developed a new feature he'll check it in to the internal (non-public) development HEAD. Changes to the development HEAD will then be automatically replicated to the public subversion repository where you can see them.
2) When all the features for a new major enterprise version are available in HEAD then Alfresco will branch the development version into a new enterprise branch which is not publicly synchronized. It is at this stage (before the bug fixes that differentiate enterprise edition) that Alfresco's Lab edition is published.
3) Internal QA and bug fixes will be applied to the internal enterprise branch. That's what Alfresco's paying customers get.
4) Sooner or later all enterprise bug fixes must be merged to development head so that they are available when the next major enterprise version will be branched off. As developers continue to add new features to HEAD at the same time, HEAD will however not be stable.

So in fact Alfresco Enterprise is based on the Labs version and not the other way round. Think of Alfresco Labs as what is called "development snapshots" in other open source projects. The snapshots Alfresco selects as Labs editions are only special in that they provide the base for an enterprise release.

This explains why the current Labs edition is always richer in features but less stable than the enterprise edition. Btw: It's similar to the approach RedHat takes with Fedora vs. RHEL. (The most important difference between RHEL and Alfresco EE is that RedHat does not own the copyright and/or full usage rights on most of the software they distribute. Alfresco does. Alfresco has a quite rigid contributor's agreement to keep on doing so.)

Jerico

[heislord5]

jerico,

That may have been the way Alfresco did things in the past (Branching one from the other) but that is not the case now.

Alfresco now maintains two separate code lines for Labs and Enterprise.  They could have completely separate feature sets and since they are two completely separate code lines, there is no guarantee that Enterprise fixes will get back to the Labs version.

An Alfresco person can chime in and validate what I am saying.

[heislord5]

If you read pages 29 & 30 of the "Alfresco Developer Guide" you will see that what I am saying is true.

[jerico_dev]

Just one month ago Matt Asay told me that 100% of the enterprise code still enters Labs. See here:

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=15454#p50669

This does not mean that 100% of the Labs code enters enterprise edition, however.

If you read pages 29 & 30 of the "Alfresco Developer Guide" you will see that what I am saying is true.

You are speaking about Packt Publishing's recent book, not about Alfresco's online developer guide in the wiki, right? I've got the book and found the text you talked about. As I understand the author he confirms that parts of "Labs" may not enter EE, not the other way round. If Alfresco changes their community approach from "unstable but feature-complete" to "stable but core features only" this will change of course.

As you say: Only somebody internal to Alfresco could clear up how the "feature reduction" for the EE is implemented - either a branch from HEAD and then deleting features or a kind of selective merging from HEAD to an independent enterprise codeline. It would be interesting to know how this works to understand the kinds of difficulties one might experience when upgrading from Labs to EE. Maybe a little off-topic for the Licencing forum. If you think it's important then we could start a different (technical) thread for that. Should we?

[heislord5]

The topic of this thread "is Alfresco a real open source?".  If it didn't belong here, then why post so many times?  It has been here for a very long time and I am directly on point with the title.

Here is some of the text from that section of the book (yes it is the book):

From time to time, functionality will be taken from Labs and placed in the Enterprise code line where it will be integrated with the rest of the product, tested, and officially released ass a new supported version.  Initially, the Enterprise edition incorporated every feature available in Labs because the two were parts of the same code line.  However, this has changed.  The two are now separate code lines.

I know this text doesn't preclude the possibility that at some point they may decide to get around to dumping code from the Enterprise line back into Labs.  The problem is that it isn't built into the process.  It is selective.  If they were coming from the same code line, there would be some "automatic" guarantees as to what got into Labs.  If every labs release was based on and started from the previous Enterprise release, then we would know that even though it is unstable, it has all the fixes the previous Enterprise had.  With two separate lines, that is much less likely to happen.  So since they aren't building labs from the previous Enterprise release, how is there any guarantees about features and fixes ever getting into labs?  Alfresco?

[mrogers]

If the author of the book (which book?) means "branches" by "code line" then they are correct there are lots of branches.  

However there is only a single "code base" for alfresco which is HEAD, to have more would be chaos!  So over time code needs to be and is merged together to/from HEAD.    However this can't be an automatic process and does take time and effort.

For example, if you have been looking at SVN or JIRA you will have already seen that most of 3.0.0E is already on HEAD.

[ivo_costa]

Hi all…

I've read people complaining about community vs enterprise stability, I've read about open vs closed source

I'll be quick about this, I'm currently working with both community and enterprise, and as far as I've noticed both versions are preaty good
and as for stability I can't complain about any of them. on the other side usually Labs is more "complete" than enterprise.

those who are complainning about Lab's lack of stability should try the enterprise, as of a few weeks ago Lab's was as stable as Enterprise.
Alfresco 3 is a new product and one must expect stability issues either it's in Enterprise of Labs.

Interesting thing I've noticed is that last labs release just before the enterprise release, and the released enterprise version, (if I'm not mistaken) had exactly the same version and build number.

So what are you complainning about? I tested both and the only difference is that Enterprise had the unstable features disabled, so in a way, Enterprise wasn't as powerful as Labs.

on the open source (for developers (opensource != freeware))… SVN anyone? what did you expect? a link saying "click here for the source"?

I see people complaining about 10-20 employees companies… those companies almost never use ECM… they just pass along a pendrive to the guy in front (good luck on trying to get those guys using an ECM, it just takes too much time loging-in)… so be my guest if you still waste time. I'm saying this, out of expecience on providing services.

one last question??? what do you expect about Enterprise putting code back into Labs, if Labs is almost Always way ahead of Enterprise???
(Sorry about this comparative… Fedora vs Redhat)

Regards

Ivo Costa
Primesoft, LDA - Certified Alfresco Partner

[vsuarez]

I see people complaining about 10-20 employees companies… those companies almost never use ECM… they just pass along a pendrive to the guy in front (good luck on trying to get those guys using an ECM, it just takes too much time loging-in)… so be my guest if you still waste time. I'm saying this, out of expecience on providing services.

I'm working with a public organization with 30,000+ potential users, and they can not use Alfresco Enterprise because they are ruled to use and promote Open Source products in some areas. In this case, they need to develop and improve the ECM and then re-distribute the new product among smaller organizations and enterprises without any kind of constraints. Besides Citizen's and user's documents must be located in a open repository with code publicly available.

As commented previously in this thread, Alfresco Entrerprise is not open source so we were obeyed to stay with Alfresco 2.1 CE because of its stability compared with Alfresco 3 Labs (B,C), and at this point is where stability become a concern and we complain about Alfresco Community/Labs policy.

This organization pays support to other open source providers (Red Hat, i.e.), but they have hard to pay support to Alfresco because of the closeness of its product. Even more, they could start to study other CM alternatives if they can get support from Alfresco.

[mabayona]

Alfresco Labs/community stability:

well, after reading some of the post, I think that it could be relevant to talk bout my experience with Alfresco Community/labs 2.1, 2.9, 3b,c:

I´m using and administering three Alfresco installations since 2006. It has been a pleasure to use and administering it. As any other non trivial piece of software, every release or delta release (from SVN) had new things…and new bugs. Nothing new. It happens with every software. This is the way software grows.

In summary, every new version needs to be tested before putting it to use in operations. This can be done either by you or by Alfresco. That´s why Alfresco is offering a tested version with support. It is up to you how value is added for the users and this is the business model of many OSS products.

I´m now using 3c (mostly DMS) and it works OK. As per any other operational sw, you have to know your user´s needs, you have to monitor it, know it and learn how to administer and extend it and fix or find workarounds for it (forums are a great source). I´m intending to start using share as as cooperation platform in production, but probably better to wait for 3d (when? ).

All in all, Alfresco is a GREAT system, growing steadily (with growing pains as everybody else) and worth using it.

I hope that in future it is easier to contribute beyond forums and documentation. My personal wish for this year is: incorporation of grails and groovy as extension possibility (very compatible with current stack). Once groovy is officially supported, it should be easy to create an "Alfresco plugin" for Grails.

[alexander]

Looks like something good is happening:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Labs_3_Stable_download_files