Alfresco-Adobe Pact Continues To Strengthen Open Source

rsmiller510 writes "Last week Adobe surprised a few people with the announcement that it was including Alfresco content management services as part of its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite Update 1 package. The surprise was two-fold: that Adobe felt it was necessary to add content management services at all, and that it chose open source vendor Alfresco as its content management partner. I spoke to Alfresco CEO John Powell to get his perspective on the pact and how it can help push open source into the enterprise mainstream. Powell is understandably excited by this arrangement, and one of the main reasons, he says, is because the Adobe partnership gives his company credibility with companies that might otherwise not even sniff at an open source vendor."

Comments

Perhaps they should consider a Pact with...

[Paul Pierce]

Sumatra PDF viewer http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

Re:Thanks but...

[Doug Neal]

Gnash is getting quite usable these days.

OK, it's not from Adobe, which is what you meant, but thought it was worth a mention anyway ;)

File servers -- why?

[thule]

It seems to me that with a nice product like Alfresco out there, why would you ever put your .doc files on a file server? Alfresco looks like a ftp, smb, and webdav server. Just copy your documents into it and they get indexed and have version control. Why do it any other way?

Slightly offtopic

[jawtheshark]

Recently I've been charged to evaluate Alfresco (community edition) as an alternative to a propitiatory document management system (which shall remain unnamed) for a large European institution. (Aside from office politics, which made clear that the evaluation should be negative to justify the expense of the propitiatory product), I never managed to get their WAR file to run on a "virgin" installed Tomcat on Debian. Their "bundle" worked as is. Anyone know how to get Alfresco to run in an apt-get tomcat5? Heck a colleague of mine tried in Windows/Tomcat5 and didn't manage, It's probably just me that sucks...

Re:Slightly offtopic

[Timbotronic]

For evaluations, I'd highly recommend downloading the Alfresco virtual appliance from JumpBox. Saves having to install it yourself.

Re:Slightly offtopic

[SpzToid]

The GP's experience installing Alfresco seems to mirror mine. And I did then what you suggest now, and yes, just using the demo version made the difference.

In my case though, I was just trying to get either the latest version running, which was a v5 RC I think. I settled for a much easier to install version that was several Revs older than current, but it worked and certainly didn't affect the evaluation, which was favorable.

Re:Slightly offtopic

[systemeng]

I deployed it under the radar scope for a small group at a 3000 person company a year or two ago. I had to build it from source to get around an annoying bug that hadn't been fixed in the release version at the time. It seems like I got it up using their install with a new war because I never managed to align all of the stuff you had to get working. It's a great product once you get it running! It's definitely better than documentum e-room.

Re:Thanks but...

[moosesocks]

Honestly, although they haven't yet opened Flash (completely), Adobe have shown some very promising signs lately.

Encourage them, and give it time. I think that they've actually gotten to the point, where they're beginning to want to cooperate, given that the company seems to have lost its competitive edge over the past few years.

I doubt flash will go completely OSS, though I do imagine that they'll substantially reduce the restrictions on it. I do believe that a successor to Flash is in the works, however. AIR is a very neat proof of concept, and seems to effortlessly achieve what Java Web Start keeps promising to do.

If there is a Flash successor, in order to compete with SilverLight, and to avoid the terrible quality of recent Flash releases (100% CPU usage to play a YouTube video!?), the format and player will likely be completely open, with a complement of a for-pay development environment.

Will Adobe open Photoshop? Probably never. However, I do believe that an open version of Flash and Linux Photoshop will very likely happen in the next few years.

Re:Adobe is poised to take over the world

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm proud to say that I can't code a line of C, C++, or Java, but my CF skills have kept me in high demand as a software engineer

You're not a software engineer. You're a codemonkey. There's a difference.

Re:Adobe is poised to take over the world

[bigman2003]

God I hate these ignorant statements.

Engineering of software doesn't really have anything to do with the language used, it has to do with an intelligent plan, architecture, systematic solution to problems, etc. etc.

Using the cool language of the day doesn't mean that the outcome will be the best.

In fact, the decline of ColdFusion as the language du jour means that the people who are using it now are much more likely to have the experience to make the right decisions that would lead to a well constructed application. I've been using ColdFusion for 9 years, and I know the right way to do things, and the wrong way to do things. I have expert skills in a very mature language/platform, so the software I produce now is rock-solid.

I run into a lot of situations where I meet a programmer who gives me a lot of shit for using ColdFusion. Typically it is someone who has less than 2 years of real-world experience. They're working on the latest and greatest language/platform and suddenly they think they have all of the answers.

These guys never really get a chance to mature in their skills. Sure they can job-hop, but I've seen the messes they create - because I've cleaned a lot of them up. If I was running a business, would I really want to trust my mission critical applications to people who have been using a programming language for two years or less? No. (Amazingly, people do this all the time because the buzzwords sound so cool! (Ruby On Rails will change the WORLD!!!) )

I'm very comfortable with my decision to keep my programming team on ColdFusion. It is my job to make sure that good maintainable software is created, and that's what we're doing.

good choice

[teaDrunk]

Alfresco has recently replaced various other doc mgmnt systems across different departments in our company. After a quick evaluation done for my team, I recommended Alfresco over other comparable inhouse-built and OTS software that were in consideration. alfresco was the only open source one being considered ( that was an influence too )
It is a good decision on Adobe's part to have selected Alfresco, and that could have gone really wrong if you consider some proprietary ones out there.

Is it really "Open Source" with no source?

[HRbnjR]

Alfresco does not supply source code for releases!

The Community Edition release binaries don't come with source and would be impossible for a "community" member to (re)create! The release SDK's don't have source for nearly the whole server either! The only complete server source code available is unstable SVN trunk - where they provide (delayed) merges from their private internal branches! No public access to their stable branches/tags or anything!

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=9932
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12610

Re:Is it really "Open Source" with no source?

[wrook]

I'll say it up front to get it out of the way: IMHO Dual licensing in order to keep a closed version and an open version (which are different) is a bad idea in almost every case. Note: dual licensing to maintain compatibility to a wide variety of licenses is a *good* idea if you want lots of participation.

Having said that, I think I understand why companies choose to dual license (one closed, one open). They want to maintain a competitive advantage over their potential competitors, but don't trust their development team to give it to them. This often happens when they have structured the business side of the deal to get paid after the fact rather than before it. They do the traditional: decide what's good for the customer, build it, convince the customer that what they've built is good.

Open source software development (IMHO) works better when you get paid up front: get a customer, ask them what they want, build it. That way you are relying on your ability to outperform your competitors in *development* rather than product (even if what you are doing is integrating products that you didn't build).

So why would a company building in a proprietary fashion open up their code? I think it has a lot to do with the perception that open source people are "hobbyists". They allow their customers to tinker with the internals to do something cool, but hamstring them so that they can't make a product out of it. They think this will give them a cool "open source community" without having to give up the family jewels.

However, the reality of the situation is that people will either just ignore you or freeload off your open source version. In fact, most enterprises (which I think are the defacto customer you want to target) don't like to upgrade more then every 18 months or so. And they don't mind being 6-12 months behind the times. And if you refuse to allow them to contribute, they will happily not give you any code *or* money.

Anyway, this is my impression of it all. Surely there's more to it, but in the end I tend to stay away from projects like this simply because I don't trust them to stay around for too long...

Re:Is it really "Open Source" with no source?

[2Bits]

That's exactly the problem with Alfresco, and it's amazing how they can claim to be 100% open source, and yet, only a crippled version is available.

It's a nice product, but that model has alienated quite a few who could be excellent contributors.

Besides, if you want to build a business model around open source software, I would think that you want to give the best first impression possible on people who try it out. And yet, you only provide a crippled version with all kinds of critical bugs. How do you expect people to pay for support, if the bloody thing does not even work when the potential customer is trying out?

Bad move for Alfresco. Bad bad move. Should take a lesson from Red Hat.