Alfresco Community News

There are lots of reasons why open source software as a design, development and distribution model has made great strides over recent years.  Distributed development and the ability to discover like-minded collaborators, made possible with the Internet, was a game changer that gave way to a host of lower cost, reliable alternatives to proprietary offerings. And the recent economic downturn is just another shot in the arm for lower cost options.

What an amazing feeling it must have been to be an early committer to Linux, Apache or one of the other hugely successful projects. The open source culture of coming together, working as a team and giving something of value back to the community has proven to be a powerful motivator.

Commercial open source admittedly does not have the same appeal. After all, there is a profit-seeking company involved. As the open source model has matured, the number of projects has surged and so has the competition for skilled volunteers. Getting an open source project off the ground these days has become much more challenging.

This reality was one of the drivers behind the commercial open source business model.  Alfresco like MySQL among others take a dual-license approach. For instance, Alfresco offers an open source content management community edition that is free to download and use but we charge a subscription fee for the supported enterprise edition that has added extensions and services.

Since the core-code is the same, commercial open source vendors have to go to great lengths to provide value to subscription customers. This means high-quality support, services to help make the production installation hum and additional extensions.

Enterprise subscriptions fund the continued improvements to the community edition.  That’s a huge benefit for community users. Bugs are fixed, new features are added. What’s the catch? Support is provided by the community itself.

At Alfresco, there are several ways to support the community, here are just a few:

• contribute to the core code line
• contribute a bug fix
• participate at a community meeting
• submit a project or language pack to the forge
• contribute sample code, tips or tutorials
• answer questions in the forums

Commercial open source is still open source. You can download it, use it for free and derive tremendous value from it. At some point you might find that you need a little help, this is where the community comes in.  So take a few minutes and answer a question or two in the forum.

It’s kind of like giving blood, it is just the right thing to do.

Download Alfresco 3.2 Community Edition.

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