Alfresco, Open Source or not?

Alfresco always claims it’s the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management. But is Alfresco truly open source? Some say they are, some say they’re not.

Alfresco have two source branches: a community lab branch and a stable enterprise branch.

The alfresco lab branch is open. The code is available for everyone. This branch contains all the newest and untested features of alfresco. I think this is good. People can start testing those new features, build new ones and give alfresco feedback. The only drawback here is that people can’t commit their own improvements, bug fixes. In this way the average bug fixes time is much bigger. The large community and its collaboration is the most important benefit of open source. They can build new features and contribute bug fixes much quicker than every commercial company.

The alfresco enterprise branch isn’t open. This branch is fully tested and supported by alfresco. Only enterprise members that pay for it, have access to this. I can understand them in one way. They also need to make money. They’re probably afraid if they open up the enterprise branch, much less users will pay for it. In the other way I think it’s better to make this branch publically available. Much more users (people that don’t want to pay for alfresco) will use alfresco in a production environment, just because it’s a stable version. The benefit is that these people will also contribute new features, detect bugs,…  I’m also sure most enterprise user will keep paying their enterprise contract. A company needs and will pay for good support. In this way the alfresco product will even improve much faster than it already does.

All code that’s in the enterprise branch is also in the lab branch. This is the main reason why alfresco always claims, they’re truly open source. Personally I don’t think this means alfresco is open source. It means alfresco lab is open source. Alfresco enterprise isn’t. People don’t have access to the code of a stable program. This is not criticism against alfresco. Every company has its own strategy. I just think that keeping the enterprise branch closed isn’t the best one.

Alfresco lab 3 is introduced with a lot of publicity. On almost every IT website, you could read this announcement. With this version Alfresco tries to be the open source alternative for SharePoint. Last months it was clear that Alfresco took another (short-term) strategy. They’re lowering their document management efforts and were more focusing on team/cross-team collaborations, project sites,…

I’ve heard a lot of concerns about this. Many people are concerned that alfresco will abandon his document management route and will keep fully focusing on the “SharePoint” market segment.

I personally don’t think this is the case. Of course, the new release took a lot of effort and time. That’s probably the reason why they didn’t expand their document management features lately. But I’m pretty sure (and certainly hope) they’ll start doing this again when they’ve build their current major DM features in their new web client.

I think their biggest challenge will be combining/integrating enterprise document management with team/cross-team collaboration. If they can achieve this, I’m sure Alfresco will become the document collaboration/management system to compare with.

What do you think of it?