Enterprise licence and potential discontinuity in the future

[huima]

Hi ya all,

this is just a 'what if'-question and in no way reflect my thinking that this scenario would be believable.

I tried to look for answers on what would happen to Alfresco enterprise licences - if Alfresco were to go under or would be bought and new owners would quadruple the licence fees to drive users to their Shiteport-offering.

What options would enterprise customers then have as the licence is a subscription - not a perpetual licence?

1) migrate enterprise solution on top of GPL'ed opensource version?

2) somehow break licencing terms and continue use EE-versions even after Alfresco as a company and product were discontinued?

[mrogers]

Your enterprise version will continue to work forever.  And you have the source code which would allow you to patch your fixes forever.

The problems would come from ongoing support requirements and guarantees and since that is a paid for option, I'm pretty sure the code would fork and you would find someone willing to maintain your the code for payment.

[huima]

Mea culpa - I was under the impression that Alfresco EE's license was also subscription, meaning that one has to have the support contract to be allowed to use ee code and features.

But is it so that if we would have an amazing Alfresco ee implementation, which just works and does not need benefits of support, patches and maintenance - then we could continue to use the ee and cut down the subscription?

Is it really so?

[mikeh]

Mea culpa - I was under the impression that Alfresco EE's license was also subscription, meaning that one has to have the support contract to be allowed to use ee code and features.

But is it so that if we would have an amazing Alfresco ee implementation, which just works and does not need benefits of support, patches and maintenance - then we could continue to use the ee and cut down the subscription?

Is it really so?

I believe that is true, yes. However, I also understand that should you then need Enterprise support in the future, you would have to back-date your subscription payments to the time they lapsed.

Thanks,
Mike

[mrogers]

And yes there are licence restrictions on you using the Enterprise extensions.  However you stated by asking what would happen if there is no Alfresco there to enforce those restrictions or a new owner of alfresco committed commerial suicide.  Neither of which are likely.   I was just pointing out that since alfresco is open source you are in a far better position than if you had a closed source project.

I suggest if you really want to persue this topic you study the details of your alfresco contract and contact alfresco sales.    The musings of a couple of Engineers are obviously not authoritive in legal matters.