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

[stevewickii]

Alfresco is not Open Source.

I also agree with the comments in this thread, Alfresco is not Open Source.  Alfresco took the term, and cleverly used it for three obvious reasons, if not more:

1) To net open source solutions providers into investing time and money into the Alfresco product.
2) To supplement their Business, QA Testing and Development resources with FREE LABOR, from an ever growing community of open source contributors.
3) To compete with more stable commercial offerings in the same space from Microsoft, Ektron, etc…

Alfresco uses the term Open Source to separate itself from the current commercial offerings like Microsoft .NET and Microsoft’s new CMS.  It is a great distraction, but the Open Source community will not be fooled.  I have to say in my opinion Alfresco is doing more to frustrate potential buyers than to build a strong community of supporters.  I cannot stand developing and troubleshooting a company’s product, and in return I cannot have the latest “stable” version of their product.  If it was so stable, why am I spending so much time troubleshooting it and digging for documentation, and fixing your documentation (wiki), and still I am not able to have the latest most stable version of the product I am working to stabilize.  No, thousands of companies who use Alfresco, Alfresco itself, benefits from the communities work, and the community doesn’t benefit from the communities own work.  How messed up is that.  Thanks a lot Alfresco, you really know how to make the community feel like part of the team.

I think Alfresco would benefit in several ways by getting rid of the community edition, and making the enterprise edition truly open source:
1) It will eliminate confusion on the whole open-source issue, and reduce the backlash it is receiving from the community.
2) It will decrease the frustration of those using the unsupported product to implement functional Proof of Concepts and live deployments.  I am trying to get Alfresco into the door of the Advertising agency I work for, but the community edition has so many bugs and poor-to-inconsistent documentation that the agency has no confidence in the enterprise edition. 
3) It will decrease the frustration of those trying to support the Alfresco project with their development and testing efforts.  You say Alfresco is a business, and shouldn’t be doing it for free, I say a testing and development services should not be offered for free.  That’s the whole reason OPEN SOURCE works.  Developers invest their time and skills in exchange for the Product they are working on.  But in your business model, you don’t give the developers what they are working on, you give them an unstable subset of the product.
4) Alfresco the company will really benefit from the free Development and Testing labor they get from the community on the latest and most stable incarnation of the product.

I can tell you this, I sure don't enjoy spending my time and money working on an unstable piece of software, when the company's own Engineers tell me that the version I am working on “will never be stable”, because “it’s the company’s model to provide paying customers with the stable version, and leave the contributing community with an unstable version.”  I'll spare you the citations - they are right here in this thread.  I will throw my support to a truly open source software, like Drupal, and wait for a client to come to my Agency offering to pony up for Alfresco.  With Microsoft in this same market, I can tell you how many times that has happened.

I hope to see Alfresco change its marketing strategy soon, but it’s been 3 years now, and I can only hold my breath so long.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the product Alfresco is producing.  This is a call to action. Alfresco, stop lying to the public about being open source CMS.   You are hurting yourself and others by doing so.  I really got excited about the Alfresco CMS.  The marketing was great, the product was aesthetically appealing, and the high level documentation was compelling.  I pitched it to my management as the best alternative to the current commercial product offerings in the same space.  But when it came to delivering a product to our client, we blew the budget trying to find documentation on implementing a content model and integrating the content into a personalized website, utterly frustrated and stressed out our developers, management and client, and I looked like a Giant A-Hole.

If you’re looking for an open source content management system, I would suggest you continue looking, and avoid the pain my development team has gone through, at least until Alfresco makes a decision to be a commercial or open source company.

BTW:  To the point that “Eclipse does the hybrid model”.  Don’t use it to support your argument for the hybrid model.  I paid for the MyEclipse, and it is slower and just as buggy as the community offering.  The community built it, and the community paid for it with their time and effort.  There’s no reason to charge for it.  The hybrid model is a bi-polar model, and it will only hurt the open source community.  Consider this.  Apache Web Server, Tomcat application server, and every framework you built Alfresco on is 100% open source, Production Quality, running in hundreds of thousands of Production environments, and they don't give their community the "buggy", "undocumented" version.

God Bless,

Stephen

[mjasay]

We have over 50,000 active deployments on Labs.  Did someone to forget to tell those people that it's not stable?  🙂

[xerox]

You argue that Alfresco is not open source, but your argument has nothing to do with open source. The Alfresco software is 100% open source, one can't argue otherwise.

In my opinion Alfresco's code is open source, Alfresco as a product isn't. All the code from the enterprise release is also(maybe a bit later or even earlier) available in the community/labs version. But the exact code of a stable,deployed version, a enterprise release isn't. Why not opening the enterprise branch? It's a question where everyone have their own opinion on. Alfresco  probably have their reasons too. Time will show if they're making the right choice.

p.s. see this blog post for some other opinions:
http://nheylen.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/alfresco-open-source-or-not/

Friendly regards,

Nick

[stevewickii]

The issue here is not really whether or not the product is open source.  What this thread is really addressing is, whether or not the Alfresco project is worth investing time and effort in from the community's perspective.  The enterprise users are getting exactly what they expect, there's no question about that, but is the community getting what they expect and deserve from their investment?  That's the question here, and right now I think not, because when the community invests its time and effort to stabalize and improve other open source projects like Apache Web Server, Tomcat, the Jakarta projects, Spring Framework, Hibernate, etc.. we benefit individually and as a group from a more stable product, but in the hybrid model Alfresco has used to date, stability is focused on the enterprise edition, and the community edition is left unstable, and more importantly, Alfresco uses the community edition to develop and test enhancements that further destabilizes the product.  Apache and Spring don't do this!  Apache, Spring and Hibernate have branches for enhancements while they are unstable, and they have alpha, beta and release candidates for testing and troubleshooting enhancements before they reach the public distribution of the project, and they don't force the community to suffer from the instability of an enhancement as we have been forced to wait on the 3.0 release to be developed and stabalize while our 2.1 and 2.9 installations suffer from bugs.

I want to include some correspondence I have had with Matt Asay at Alfresco, after my last post.  Matt has a good response, and I appreciate that he is engaging in this conversation.  I have included Matt's response to the post on the forum, and my response to Matt's reply.

Here's matt's response to my previous post:

From: Matt Asay [mailto:m***.a***@alfresco.com]
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 8:04 PM
To: Stephen Wick
Cc: info@alfresco.com
Subject: Re: Community View on Alfresco


Thanks, Stephen.  We firmly believe in open source, which is why Alfresco has released hundreds of thousands of lines of code under an open-source license that no one - including us - can take away from you.  It's GPL.  I'm not sure how we can make it more open source?

Indeed, I believe you and your company have happily used it for a long time.  I seem to remember exchanging emails with you as long as two years ago?

We have a range of exceptional customers, and we'd love to have Nicholson Kovac as one of them, joining other great advertising companies that work with us.  Those companies generally buy support contracts for their clients, and so we've had organizations as diverse as OnStar, Activision, and the National Rifle Association use Alfresco and find great value in it.

There are 50,000+ active deployments of Alfresco Labs worldwide, of which roughly 1% actually pay us money.  It sounds like we're the ones getting screwed here.  🙂

It may be that the product doesn't work well for you, but customers like Apple, Morgan Stanley, Activision, and others seem to be finding great value in it.  Again, we'd love to find a way for it to work for you, and have a dedicated support team for that purpose.  We'd love to put them to work for you.

Matt


____________________
Matt Asay
General Manager and Vice President, Americas
Alfresco
mnasay (aim), mjasay (skype, yim) |
http://cnet.com/openroad

And here's my response to Matt's e-mail:

Matt,

If you feel you are getting screwed, because people are using your product for free, then stop trying to use an open source model.  The open source model is not for Companies that have implicit or explicit expectations of drawing a substantial income from the development and distribution of the open source product.  Open Source is for a community of people, working together to develop a product.  They "pay" for the product by spending their time and effort troubleshooting, fixing and enhancing a product for themselves and the benefit of the group.  The "hybrid" commercial-open source approach creates the frustration on both sides, because the Company is trying to make money and it doesn't, and the community is investing in the product and they are not getting what they pay for.

Thank you for your time and for engaging in this conversation,

Stephen

[stevewickii]

Just so you all know where I'm coming from…  My intention is not to bash Alfresco.  I have used the community version for a couple of years now.  At this point I have decided to pay for Alfresco Training, and we will probably pay for the Enterprise Edition of the Alfresco product very soon.  Not because my experience with the community edition has been great, but because our client needs a stable version of the product and so that we don't waste our time working on an unstable version of the product.

I am writing, to support the arguments and frustrations from the open source community's perspective. I am writing, because I am invested in seeing Alfresco succeed, and I want to see this frustration go away.  I really love what this product does and how it does it.  It has a great architecture and, the developers have done a great job creating an enterprise content management system.

[stevewickii]

We have over 50,000 active deployments on Labs.  Did someone to forget to tell those people that it's not stable?  🙂

To what extent are these 50,000 Production deployments being used?  We are using the Alfresco CMS for 4 very dynamic and personalizable websites via the Web Service client API and WebScripts interface, and we have several documented bugs with respect to authentication and authorization, functionality, and performance.  We have had to investigate and write several work arounds to get our sites to work.  Aside from the enterprise branches of code, where is the 2.9 (b) branch?  There is a 2.9B Version in the Alfresco JIRA, but there's no way to get the 2.9 source code, fix it, and submit the fix to a 2.9 branch.  Those of us who have production deployments of community need a branch for each major version of Alfresco, so that we are not required to invest more time and money into upgrading to another major release every time we need one bug fixed.

[dmatejka]

Hi everybody,
I have to add few words to this discussion.
I remember time (and it was not more than few years ago) when even thinking of Document Management cost you money and pain. I'm an entrepreneur really eager for new technologies and possibilities in a field of publishing. I have always wanted to put some logic and structure in a world of DTP, but the possibilities were limited and available only for big enterprises.

Documentum was a project I would be happy to implement (but no way to have such a resources available). After a lot of research I have found several open source projects that were trying to achieve something similar.

First we have started with NUXEO project (which may be closer to Stephen's view of Open Source project), but after few months of exploration I have run into Alfresco and I liked it so much that I have dropped the NUXEO project and started to learn about Alfresco.

Unfortunately we are really small company (4 people still struggling to make some money for living) and have no developer inside the company so the implementation is going pretty slow. Actually also I was kind of frustrated last year because of waiting for some "stable" release.

Right now we are at the start of in-house production testing and I believe we will be able to deliver more and faster to our customers as soon as we will manage to work Alfresco as we want to.

Although I have no idea when this is going to happened I'm sure i will continue to try, because the ideas and the way alfresco is working with the information is exactly as I have always dreamed of.

Anyway, the possibility to implement such a solution even for such a small company as we are is something Alfresco (and people behind) deserves respect for. The amount of work they have done till today is amazing.  Even the fact they find the time to answer questions here in the forum is something that I can not understand.

I have paid for a lot of things that (at the end) did not bring that much value back. Here is the opportunity to start… work.. use.. and possibly to earn money on the project without paying a dollar. I think the possibility to have support of the people behind all of this is more than worth the money.  

There will be nothing anybody can complain of if they manage to "mark" unstable parts of LAB edition. 

Keep going Alfresco! 

[dmatejka]

Hi Luis,
thank you for your words and your time.
You are doing a lot in helping the community,, wiki is getting better every day, but sometimes it is really hard to realize to which version it is applied (new categories are a good idea.. but the implementation is kind of stuck - which I believe will be solved with a new community portal (soon?   ) Looking forward for new social features at your site.
Also your Tech Talk Live was always interesting to see and hear (did you stop?.. or just a pause in a busy days?).

For me personally it would be really helpful if you can point me to what kind of skill set we have to look for when we consider to hire somebody as an in-house developer to help us with implementing alfresco and making it work smoothly (I know one developer is nothing.. but we have to start somewhere). Is javascript/webscript enough for the start or do we need somebody with java background?

It is so great that really a big portion of a customization can be done by me as a business user! This and the support of the CIFS protocol is just what made my decision.
The biggest need for our customization is in advanced workflow (which is little bit over my current time resources to learn).. is there the way that you would recommend to start with? or some more examples/ tutorials that could be explored?

In general…  examples, use cases, tutorials, how-to… with detailed comments are really appreciated.

[fselendic]

Steve,

Thanks for the compliments to our team of engineers.

You note:

because our client needs a stable version of the product and so that we don't waste our time working on an unstable version of the product.

I have to ask…

Presumably your clients pay you to implement a solution for them have they not?

Are you arguing that you're entitled to a free ($0) Enterprise build to help ensure the success of your customer projects and maintain your reputation but are unwilling to share the wealth in order to get a support contract that helps guarantee your success?

That's like having your cake and eating it too!

I've already stated that an Enterprise subscription is affordable, in your case I'm willing to bet that a $16K a year Alfresco License would easily service 3-4 of your customers if you chose to host a shared server on their behalf. How much do you stand to make from those 3-4 customers?

Isn't $16K a worthwhile investment for peace of mind and a dedicated backup crew of experts standing ready to help?

I don't understand…

Well, $16k is not a small amount, actually. That kind of yearly fee renders Alfresco unusable in lots of smaller projects.

Main problem is that there's nothing between $0 and $16k. I'm not an expert in MS pricing, but I'm almost 100% sure that they have Sharepoint version that fits nicely in that space not covered by Alfresco. Sure, it probably doesn't bring all bells and whistles, but it does collaboration and DM fairly good. If memory serves me right, it was around $8k for a server that will satisfy most small and medium businesses.

With Alfresco going "Sharepoint replacement" route, that 0-16k hole has to be filled somehow, because, well, in open source volume is everything, and volume won't come from enterprises only, Alfresco has to be able to fight in SMB space too.

Note that I don't offer a solution, because I don't see an easy one Just am a little concerned how will lab/experimental/unstable (either as a "stamp" or actual quality of software) impact distribution of Alfresco. Also, there IS a problem with people trying to go head to head against Sharepoint in SMB market.

[fselendic]

First of all I suggested a shared deployment among Steves' customers which means the support costs can be distributed among them.

Second, SharePoint pricing is terribly complex and subject to per-user costs (CALs), interdependencies with other MSFT products and different components depending on whether you're building an intranet or Internet site.

You can try to make sense of it here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101865111033.aspx#3
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mla/default.aspx?sitecontextid=default

I ran the quote wizard for a deployment with 20 internal users, Windows 2008 Server, MSSQL Server and unlimited internet users and got a grand total of $79,657.00

The most expensive bit was Microsoft SharePoint for Internet Sites which was priced at: $60,186.00 for a single server. So an internal deployment would cost about $19,000.00. Remember that upgrading to newer versions incur an additional cost whereas all subscribers to Alfresco Enterprise are entitled to free upgrades.

Alfresco can be readily applied to any number of users and internal as well as external sites at no additional cost.

Naturally there is a cutoff… A small deployment of SharePoint for 5 users costs about $5,000 EXCLUDING the cost of Windows 2008 Server and MSSQL Server. Alfresco is looking to come up with an offering for "micro installations" that's priced attractively.

So, if Steve's using Alfresco WCM for his advertising clients, a single Alfresco server without user limits is still quite affordable or at worst is comparable in price to the alternative from Microsoft even when amortized over the course of 2.5 years which is the average MSFT release cycle.

Yep, sorry, I noticed that you were referring to hosted and shared solution when I was near the end of my comment….but, nevertheless, the pricing of Alfresco you mentioned is real, so it does help discussion.

I'm not saying Alfresco is expensive for what it offers (and I do hate MS complex pricing ). Just, implementing it is a bit problematic in some scenarios in current situation.

There is A LOT companies out there that could use DM, CMS/WCM, workflow, collaboration….I don't want everything for free, I just wanted to point out that you guys do have a nasty hole ($0-$15k) in your pricing/distribution strategy, and that some of us were bitten by it. Which sounds like whining, I know, but I'm posting here because I'm 100% sure that Alfresco will too be bitten by it in the end; that hole cripples your installation base, your volume, and in the end, with OS, volume is The King.

A stable community version would fill that hole nicely. You don't have to call it stable, though, just make sure it works If you want to make some money from low end, maybe also some kind of special partnership agreements for subcontractors spreading community version. Or, maybe "micro installations" you mentioned. I really don't know solution that would fit you guys the best. I know you are doing great in high end now, but would hate to see you neglecting low end because of that.