Thanks for your question. I am an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative and serve as inside counsel in the US for Alfresco. My comments below.

It is true that we require in most cases that our partners provide services around Enterprise, not Community. This is simply a way to help both our partners and us. At times where it does neither, we waive the requirement. I've never heard one of our partners complain about this, as it creates a close, symbiotic relationship between Alfresco and the partner, and hence a better experience for the customer.

This is in clear compliance with the OSD (and the GPL). We do not in any way encumber the source code itself, which is all that the OSD addresses.

No, it is absolutely not correct that "partners are forced to revoke rights they gained under GPL (and, incidentally, this requirement of ours is followed by every open-source company I know, including those you would not remotely question as "open source"). I think you're confusing software licensing with the partner contract, only the former of which matters for the OSD. The contracts that we sign with our partners have no bearing on GPL compliance. I'd invite you to read Red Hat's Enterprise Linux license as an example of a contract mechanism to protect Red Hat's trademarks (and the binary distribution of RHEL), while still living within the spirit and letter of the GPL.

If Alfresco employees have suggested that Alfresco Enterprise is open source, they spoke inaccurately, but not with the intent to mislead, and I don't fault them since 100% of our code is available as open source. All of the Enterprise code is made available in Labs at present (though of course this might change in the future), and hence is made available as GPL software.

For the benefit of customers (nearly all of which do not want the redistribution/contribution requirement of the GPL, but like the ability to view and modify source code), we make our Enterprise code available under a commercial license, similar to MySQL and other open-source companies (Zimbra, SugarCRM, etc.). It's called "dual licensing." Customers get all the benefits of the GPL, plus the peace of mind for their legal teams that they need not worry about contributing back derivative works, added warranties and indemnification, and other benefits.

I think the Alfresco employees were simply suggesting that all of the underlying source code is made available as open source in Alfresco Labs. In fact, more code is made available in Labs than in Enterprise. However, when we distribute our code as Enterprise, it is under a commercial license, not the GPL, though that same code is made available under the GPL in Labs. I apologize for the confusion.

Actually, partners can redistribute to the end customer any modifications they make to the Alfresco software, and this is done on a daily basis. Because of the commercial licensing of Enterprise, however, they are not required to contribute these changes back to Alfresco or the wider Alfresco community, though we encourage them to do so and have had some excellent contributions back from system integrators like Rivet Logic.

Please see above. I should also note that I've never actually heard a customer indicate the slightest concern on this. It would seem that those outside the community care much more than those within the community, who are primarily focused on solving business problems, not attempting to unravel open-source riddles. (I say this not as a rebuke of you, as I've long been one of the biggest "riddlers" in open source, but I'm just not sure that it really serves any useful purpose for customers. I spoke to a group of 50 prominent CTOs recently and to a person they actually recommended mixing proprietary software (which we currently do not have) with open-source software, including a prominent representative from the Apache Software Foundation. Go figure.

1. No, this is 100% wrong. Sorry.
2. Yes, you are correct.
3. No, this is 100% wrong. Employees are not directed to say anything, misinformation or otherwise. They say it because 100% of our code is made available under the GPL, including all of the code available under Enterprise. We simply dual license at the point of sale at the request of our customers.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. Feel free to contact me directly if you have further questions.

Thank you very much for the clear explanation. I have tried to find the answer to this question for months.

Now, the "The Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management" slogan must be removed asap from the web, or do you think Alfresco CE or Labs are a real alternative to ECM?

This information is very valuable for me and for my clients that are required to install open source products. Many of them can afford to pay licences and official support, but the product must be open source (OSI compliant).

Regards

I really don't want to offend anyone, but it would be great if key PR Alfresco people could get their stories together.

That's from Luis, Product Evangelist, one month ago. Now we have VP of business development (I think that it is you, Matt :D ) saying totally opposite.

Is it just me, or this sound like "Our 100% clean water (with even more stuff mixed in, good and bad) is available to everyone. Our clean water is free for all!"

Let's put it this way: between 30,000 and 50,000 (I don't have the most current numbers, but it's 30,000 minimum and probably 50,000 maximum) companies actively deploy Alfresco Labs. We have roughly 700 paid customers (growing 100+/quarter) using Enterprise. But I think the number of Labs users suggests a) it's a fantastic product that works and b) yes, you can run Alfresco Labs as an "open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management." Tens of thousands do.

Unfortunately, Luis misspoke, but I know him well enough to know that he didn't intend to deceive. He just got confused. As I say above, 100% of the code that goes into Enterprise is open source at present BUT we release Enterprise under a commercial license (dual licensing, just like MySQL and others).

So, it is absolutely not the case that Alfresco Enterprise is GPL, and that you can distribute it under the GPL. You can't (as we don't). I'm very sorry for the confusion.

I'm sorry. I thought I did answer that. Yes, our partners agree to distribute Enterprise BUT, as I said, we also allow them to distribute/use Labs, when it makes sense for the customer (and them). So, I can't give you the 100% binary answer that you want because there is no 100% binary answer. I can tell you, however, that I would prefer to have our partners only work with Enterprise. There are hundreds of system integrators that will gladly support/distribute Alfresco Labs.

For those partners upon whom we build our services business (we do little to no services ourselves), we want to make sure that their interests are aligned with ours, and they want the same thing from us. Our commitment to them is that we won't compete with them on services. Their commitment to us is that they will focus on Enterprise. Where the two commitments need to bend to accommodate real-world situations, we bend.

I saw the Slashdot chatter, and your follow up post (above). Thank you for acknowledging that the partner agreements don't violate the GPL, as the Slashdot community said.

I can see how it would look that way, but I'm really not trying to hide anything. I just don't think that "open source" is as binary as some (maybe you?) think. The OSI isn't binary on the issue, either. Get a GPL advocate like myself in a room with an Apache advocate and you'll find that there are lots of shades of gray, even within the "pure" open source people.

But I make no apology for feeling that open source gets better when it accommodates business, and that it is not pretend open source to mix business concerns with open source concerns. I think the two get better when brought together.

Red Hat is more than RHEL. But even RHEL prohibits binary redistribution, and Red Hat has done some clever things to make it less-than-easy to pull out its trademarks such that RHEL-minus-trademarks is not quite RHEL. But I'm not suggesting that Red Hat has done anything wrong: I think it is doing exactly what every open-source company seeks to do: find ways to be a good open-source citizen while also finding ways to make enough money that it can reinvest in open-source code.

Because we like to get paid a salary as much as you do. Because we charge for the service that goes into "baking" Enterprise. Tens of thousands of enterprises would disagree with your contention that Alfresco Labs is not "marketable or usable." Ask GE, The Hartford, and Fidelity, three massive companies that use Alfresco in significant ways, yet have never paid us a dime for Alfresco Enterprise. They seem to think Alfresco Labs works quite well.

The difference, of course, is that they prefer to invest time to save money (to use Marten Mickos' phrase). Alfresco does extensive QA for its Enterprise release. You seem to want us to save you all the time *and* money that our Enterprise customers give to us, and I frankly find that unfair.

So, I come back to my original point: we publish 100% of our code, and 100% of our bug fixes. It *is* true that we delay some bug fixes going into Labs, as do other open-source companies. But this is because we want to create a differentiated experience for our Enterprise customers. They contribute to our success. So far, though I appreciate your help in making sure our marketing is clear, I haven't seen what you contribute to Alfresco. Code? I have not seen it, but I thought that was one of the cardinal virtues of open source.

Perhaps we should discount Enterprise subscriptions for code contributors? I think we'd probably be very happy to do that. I'm certain that we'd be interested in keeping bug fixes made by the community always available in Labs. Contribute something and let's make it work. That's what a community is, right?

I agree with that. But that's why I think it's a bit unfair of you to not look at all the things that Alfresco tries to do beyond the code itself.

This is a good point. I don't think it's actually true. Have you visited the websites of SugarCRM, Zimbra, etc. lately?

SugarCRM: "SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes."
Zimbra: "Zimbra, a Yahoo! company, is the leader in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software."
MySQL: Try going to its page today, and you'll be greeted with (that's right!) a promotion for its proprietary Query Analyzer.
Etc.

But this obscures a larger point: would you prefer that Alfresco completely open 95% of its code and make a few extensions proprietary (maybe 5%)? Maybe that 5%, as with Sugar and Zimbra, would only matter if you were running Alfresco with proprietary software (e.g., if you wanted to run Alfresco with Oracle DB, or perhaps if you wanted to connect it to Microsoft Office), or were in serious, large-scale production?

Would that be an interesting trade-off for you? You would not have to worry about whether Labs was less stable than Enterprise. You'd only need to worry about whether a few features were unavailable in Labs. It's the model Alfresco had three years ago (but dropped because the community didn't like having to pay for anything :-), but it is one that has worked for Zimbra, SugarCRM, Hyperic, and others, and maybe we should try it out again? Would that make a cleaner relationship for Alfresco with its open-source code, in your mind? I'm genuinely very interested, as I happen to believe that a 100% open-source model tends to create the very tension you've identified. See [a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10067267-16.html"]my CNET post on it[/a].

Already done! See above. :-)

(Actually, has it ever occurred to you that one reason the Labs release is occasionally unstable is because of the frenetic pace of development, and not out of any devious design to thwart the community? We are writing a HECK of a lot of code, and quite frankly it's not easy to keep Labs, which is intended as our experimental place, perfectly stable all the time. We're therefore trying to identify stable builds as we go along to help you invest in the right build. If we're screwing up, I really do appreciate hearing about it, as does the Engineering team.)

No, it just means that you now have a great opportunity to work with the Alfresco community to make it even better (cleaner). We'd love to have your help.

Matt

Honestly, I admired what Alfresco did when it changed to GPL around 2.1. 2.1 Community release was great. I was really inspired spending my spare time writing addons and extensions to Alfresco. And... stopped it when there was no usable release for over a year and Community was renamed to Labs (just felt little bit deceived).

Recently when Luis confirmed that stable release is on the way I started it again.

I would not mind stable community release come out months later then enterprise. I also would not mind some features to be marked "not available" in binary release. It is better to have no Kerberos then Kerberos that does not work. But no stable releases at all... Do you know many open source projects that does not do stable (open source) releases after version 1?

If you do not have time to do stable releases - community is there to help you. I think that is why Florian started these discussions.

Thanks
Alexander

Hello Matt,

I just discovered this topic through the post on Slashdot.

As a certified Alfresco trainer I often have to explain both the open source model and the business model of Alfresco when it comes to describing the various bundles and versions. I am glad to see these open source "issues" explained.

Still, one question comes to my mind:

As a partner, I get access to Enterprise SDK bundles which contain the source code. Anyway, although there are GPL headers in the files, I understand that it cannot be redistributed.

Could you please tell me where to get the GPL source code for Alfresco 2.2 or any version of Alfresco other than 2.1 and 3.0 labs? Again, I ask this not to start doing business with the community versions but just to be able to answer these questions when asked during a training session.

I also learned as an OSI board member that the world (including the open-source world) is not as binary as you think, and perhaps as binary as both you and I would like. It would seem that you want "open source" to only apply to those that use support (and only support) as their business model. I was once sympathetic to this, but I was wrong then, and if that's your argument now, then I respectfully disagree with you.

Is SugarCRM an open-source company? Of course it is. Is MySQL? Yes. Is Red Hat? Yes. Is Alfresco? Yes. Yet each restricts use of the open-source code or introduces proprietary bits to complement the open-source code. Yes, including Red Hat. I used to wish that there was a magical, simple formula for identifying one company as open source and another as proprietary, but that formula disappeared, if it ever existed, and I'm not interested in trying to retrieve it. I'm much more interested in seeing ever-greater amounts of code being released as open source, whether by Alfresco or Microsoft or Novell or Apache or Eclipse or ... you name it.

What you seem to not understand, or at least aren't articulating (or perhaps I'm just misunderstanding), is that Alfresco's model is very, very similar to Red Hat's, as well as MySQL's. I think you need to spend a bit more time analyzing Red Hat's licensing before you accuse Alfresco of standing alone as the one bastard open-source company.

May I ask why? Would that actually convince you to contribute a single line of code, instead of comments on the forums? I would love to have you contribute, since you are very fond of open source, as am I. We've written an exceptional Enterprise Content Management system. You're complaining because we release a binary distribution of our code under a commercial license? I think you probably have better things to do.

I haven't found anyone but you that seems to care to try to make the distinction. We call ourselves an open-source company, and so we are. We make 100% of our code open source. You can go download it now and see for yourself. I understand that you want every line of code that we write to be open source at all times to be considered an open-source company, but this is foolish and, frankly, we just won't, just as Red Hat doesn't, MySQL doesn't, and no other open-source company does.

Would I use Labs in production? No. But there are at least 30,000 companies on this planet that disagree with me. As for Drupal's stats, they're fantastic! But why should I care?

Awesome! We are in complete agreement. You've just blessed three companies that have approaches very, very similar to ours. You have also implied that in order to placate "community members" like yourself who contribute no code or cash to the project, we should ensure that the core is absolutely stable but introduce proprietary extensions so that we can get paid by someone (though I understand it won't be you).

But the "open source community" has not bashed us. You have. As near as I can tell, given that you're not contributing anything to the project (including using it and submitting bug reports or anything else), we have lost little if you decide to focus on Drupal or another CMS. I'd prefer to have you stick with Alfresco, but I will admit I'm now tired of the rhetorical riddling (you said you liked that word). You know what our model is. You know that you can get the code as open source. You also know that if you want immediate bug fixes and more QA you are absolutely free to provide both. In other words, you are free to be part of our community, rather than sitting on the outside, carping at problems you see. I've never had an actual customer or serious user of Alfresco complain about the things you're complaining of.

And now who is the victim of clever marketing? Read the license. You cannot get support for RHEL without buying a license. You cannot get a license without buying support for RHEL. R0ml Lefkowitz once famously called Red Hat's model a subtle case of "Sharia" license-making years ago at OSCON. I invite you to Google for it to read more.

I would (sincerely) love to see you succeed with that model.

This would be fantastic. Seriously. Now do me a favor: instead of looking for problems, I'd like you to try looking for solutions. You think we're being deceitful. I disagree. But I want to hear what licensing model you would prefer. You suggest above that a stable core is more important than whether we introduce proprietary extensions, which we have resisted. The ironic and frustrating thing is that we have tried to avoid any proprietary software in order to appease "the community" like you while also creating a business model that will enable us to fund more great code development.

What I'm hearing, however, is that the tightrope we have to walk to do this doesn't work for you. You want 100% open source, and then a clear statement that everything else (proprietary extensions, or whatever) is not open source. I think that's a fair request, though I'd still call a "mostly" open source company "open source" because I firmly believe that MySQL, Red Hat, SugarCRM, Hyperic, etc. are open-source companies even though not all of their software is open source, or openly distributed.

I won't pretend that we have cornered the market on perfection. You have pointed out missteps that we've made. I admit them, or defend them (in some cases). But I want more than just criticism from you: I want some clear indication of what it would take to convince you to not sit on the sidelines and criticize, but instead join up and contribute (cash or code - I don't care which). If that's a 100% commitment to a stable, completely up-to-date core, then that's what I'll take to our management meetings in December. If it's something else, let me know.

Now that we're talking over email, I'm going to forbear from posting here, except to sincerely thank you, Jerico, for posting your concerns. I/we take them seriously and will respond transparently. However, as I told you over email, we're at the end of our quarter this month and have management meetings in the second week of December. Realistically, I don't think anything will be able to happen until then.