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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."
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?
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...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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.
No reason to lie.
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