>It’s a good point, Nick, but one that could also be made of Red Hat. Is it open source? Of course. Is it freely available to all? Sort of.

I could be wrong but I was under the impression that Red Hat do not make the binary version of RHEL freely available (i.e. you have to pay for it) but that the source code (which I believe is stable) is available to the community. Does this suggest that, by making the stable source code available, it may be possible to feed the family and the community? PS. keep up the good work with your blog – it’s always a good read.

Glad to hear your (or alfresco’s) opinion.
Indeed, theoretical you can create an Alfresco Enterprise from the lab’s branch. In practice, this isn’t feasible. This means you need to stabilize the lab version. But what to do when you want to upgrade? You need to stabilize it again and again, etc. I think this isn’t workable for a company.

It’s also true that many companies will use (and make benefit of) the software without giving anything back. But their will be many others that will pay for the support, feature requests, etc.
I really think that alfresco’s product and its customer base will even grow much faster.

As I said I respect alfresco’s choice and strategy. I just don’t think it’s the best one on the longer terms.
But in fact, that’s just my humble opinion.

P.S. I really appreciate your feedback.

I think it’s pretty remarkable that Alfresco (Disclosure: I work for Alfresco) has chosen to open source all of its code. The bits are free, but the service (full QA, certification, etc.) is not, just as with RHEL versus Fedora. You can absolutely create Alfresco Enterprise from Alfresco Labs on your own. We give you 100% of the source code to do so.

But we need to feed our families, and you’d be surprised by just how many companies are happy to use open-source software without giving *anything* back: Code, cash, commentary, etc.

Early on, we had proprietary extensions for Alfresco. We nixed those, however, as we wanted to be 100% open. Even so, it was clear that we needed to have some differentiation between Enterprise and Labs, and I think we’ve settled on a pretty good way to do that. Perfect? Of course not. But it’s a way for us to feed our community and our families at the same time.

That said, we welcome this kind of feedback and hope that you’ll continue to participate in the Alfresco community in this and other ways.

I acknowledge that this is a difficult subject.

Indeed, a company needs money to deliver more. So I think closing the enterprise branch was a good idea when they start alfresco.
But as I said I don’t think alfresco will lose enterprise customers when they open up their enterprise branch. Companies will keep paying for support and “feature requests”. (Of course, as long as they delivers good support)

In the open source world forks are always a threat for the founders of the product.
But I don’t think opening the enterprise code will make this threat bigger. All the code is in the labs version. If someone wants to create a “fork company” they just take this code, stabilize it and go further… So I don’t think this is an argument to keep the enterprise branch closed. The threat is already there.

Friendly regards,

Nick

In a ideal world, everything can be leaded by non-profit – as the Apache foundation is, even if they accept money from … Microsoft, IBM, and many other companies!

In the real world, a company need money to be able to deliver more. I have no moral dilemna in using the GPL version of Alfresco, whatever the Enterprise license is.

They say that the Labs version is less stable but, honestly, if I was an Entreprise customer I wouldn’t want to read anything else

As a daily labs user, I’ve never encountered any unstability but that’s perhaps I’m a basic user.

I presume they do not want to be in the RedHat Enterprise case: the code is available, may forks exist – White Box, CentOS, … – and so far the main competitor of RedHat Enterprise are forks.

I have a friend who works for RedHat and he said me that this is a real problem. This why I’m not sure that opening the Entreprise branch would be a good idea. Or perhaps not before reaching a sort of ‘critical mass’.

As a lab user, my interest is that Alfresco remains perennial and in case the dual licensing is the best way, that’s ok for me.

Thanks for this blog !