Alfresco-Adobe Pact Continues To Strengthen Open Source 64
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."
Perhaps they should consider a Pact with... (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Open Flash.
Well, in any case, me (and the average desktop user) cares more about it than some content management system.
Come to think of it, can't we smuggle something into the project that'll send us the sources we need?
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Gnash [gnu.org] 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 ;)
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It does play Youtube.
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I could never get it to work...
It's still got a ways to go.
Re:Thanks but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
File servers -- why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Because not everyone needs indexing and version control.
I think they do. They just do not know it yet.
Slightly offtopic (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
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If the "large European institution" is part of (tax payer financed) European Union I recommend that you discard the office politics and make a real evaluation.
For heavy duty content management there is also Typo3. It is PHP based and quite easy to install.
-- EU tax payer
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Well, I have some news for you: being a consultant is pretty much the same as being a whore. You either do what your customer instructs you, or you say "no". It's really that simple, but I have a mortgage to pay. Guess what I do?
If you want to save EU taxes, then start by cropping the institutions themselves. These people are paid up to 2x market rate (and more!) and have additional tax advantages and can't be fired. Yet, they hire a Consultant to do their jobs. Don't you find that funny?
Also they co
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As if there were any relation between what the government wants and what the people want ;)
Didn't work for communism, does not work for democracy, will not work as long as the interest of the ones governing differs from the interest of those being governed. (Hint: Make them the same and simplify trough automatation --> metagovernment.org)
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Re:Slightly offtopic (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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I couldn't get it to work either. I think you need their prof. services to get anywhere.
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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.
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And obviously an employee of Adobe.
Re:Adobe is poised to take over the world (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It is my job to make sure that good maintainable software is created, and that's what we're doing.
It's not your only job; amongst others, it's also keeping your team members up to speed on current technologies. Just sayin'.
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He is working! He is marketing his product. In fact he deserves a bonus.
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This entirely negates your attempt at insight, however that spelling of superfluous is the funniest thing I've seen on Slashdot today.
If I had mod points today, you would be getting a 'Funny' mister AC. I imagine your post is an elaborate joke anyway. Someone who understands the difference between Open Source and Free
Interesting (Score:1)
The timing is a coincidence. Our organization has about 3000 employees. We had Adobe reps in this week to demo some of their solutions. They didn't demo Alfresco because they said it won't be out until next month. But, I can say that looking strictly at an Open Source app is not something I would expect from our organization. Not that we are dead set against it, it's just that it hasn't been presented to us in a cohesive manner from a reputable company like Adobe. Interesting....
good choice (Score:2, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [alfresco.com]
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12610 [alfresco.com]
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No Alfresco developers work for free. All development is done in-house. Whether you consider that to be true "Open Source" or not is up for debate.
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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 d
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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 expe
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Feature-rich??? No "real" enterprise customer prefers to run a production server based off an untested SVN trunk for extra features, instead of the stability of a tested branch!
Any project that doesn't supply source code and security/bug fixes for stable releases is absolutely no good for production use and might as well not be open source!
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Ok, I think I understand now...
- Releases of the Community Edition have open source (GPL'd) code available, but those releases receive no timely stable branch bugfix or security updates, and thus are not supported for enterprise use.
- Releases of the Enterprise Edition do not have open source (GPL'd) code available, but those releases do receive timely bugfix and security updates, and thus are supported for enterprise use.
So, in summary, one can choose between unstable Community Edition with GPL'd source, o
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The company I work for *is* an Enterprise customer, and we do have access to the private SVN repository.
And that has nothing to do with this thread.
Is that code GPL'd? Can I package up the SVN branches from the private repo into SRPM's and send updated packages to Fedora/RedHat then? Can I share it with my friends? Can I ship a new product based on it and charge for support myself? I think not.
This is exactly why I dislike the term "Open Source". Just because one can access the source doesn't mean they
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That sounds strange. I built Alfresco from scratch several times during the last 3 months using the SVN HEAD sourcecode and a simple ant command ('ant build-tomcat' in my case).
The revision number in the release notes in case you search for it : http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Release_2.1#Important_Notes
I agree with you on one point: they should use tags instead of using only revision numbers. But on the other way I promise that if I can (re)create Alfresco from source, everyone can :)
Do you use http://svn.al
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There is a source revision in SVN for the initial 2.1.0 release, sure - but then after release, they immediately bumped it and started pushing code for the 2.9/3.0 features - you don't have any way to retrieve a tag for any follow-up branch minor releases like 2.1.X or even 2.2.X. Sure, you could try to back-port fixes from those branches which were eventually merged onto the trunk - but the trunk differences might prevent them from even being applicable, and without actual source access, there is no way f
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You're right, the open source version is almost impossible to manage after being installed.What's more, they did not release anything 'stable enought' for almost one year.Disturbing.They're open source, but just enough to claim it.Not enough to get real value from their community of users - so far there's no interest at all in contributing - they're rewarding system is so traditional software school.I'll not be surprise in case they decide to switch to a more closed model one day.This day,I'll search anothe
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If a member of the community can't access the source code to recreate the "Community Edition" release, how is that possibly open source?
And anyone who thinks "not open development" is a "good thing" just flat out shouldn't be involved in the Free and Open Source community at all. You just plain don't Get It.
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I'm sorry, I was running on the incorrect newbie assumption that there would be (perhaps delayed) follow-up point releases for the Community Edition in the case of critical bugs or security vulnerabilities. Thankfully, you have brought to my attention the total lack of recent Community Edition point releases, and the fact that there probably never will be further stable releases (ie, 2.2) because, as you say, it's not meant to be "suitable for Enterprise use", and that, with no public stable branches in co
Should have chosen Apache products (Score:1)