[OOTB-hive] CE looking bad?

[Richard Esplin]

I am not sure how you read what I said and got "to use Alfresco you have to 
buy Enterprise Edition". I think you should reread my email because I was 
saying the exact opposite. In fact I have spent the last four years working to 
increase the adoption of Alfresco Community Edition.

But my answer was also intended to explain our product intentions so that you 
understand where we are focusing our investment. My proposal for where 
Community Edition is most valuable was partially based on my conversations 
with your employer about their business model. I want to verify that we do 
what we can do accommodate all members of the Order of the Bee and the wider 
Alfresco community.

Last year the Order of the Bee had a conversation about the role that Alfresco 
employees play in this community. We agreed that Alfresco employees are 
welcome here, though they do not have voting privileges. If that changes, I am 
willing to follow the decision of the group. Though I do find the conversations 
here very useful in educating me how Community Edition is used so that I can 
better adapt the product to your needs.

Likewise, if my specific attempts to answer questions in this thread are not 
considered valuable, then the wider group should let me know and I'll scale it 
back.

Cheers,

Richard

On Friday, May 22, 2015 06:42:00 Torben Lauritzen wrote:
> Good morning.
> 
> So everything boils down to:
> 
> "If you really want to use Alfresco (the product), you have to buy Alfresco
> EE."
> 
> That is exactly why I think the Open Source brand is being misused!
> 
> I very much appreciate the huge amount of work that Alfresco Inc. puts into
> developing the product, but I think we should stop fooling ourselves, and
> either accept the way things are, or try to build something truly Open
> Source, which can compete with EE.
> 
> @Alfresco employees: Even though I welcome your participation in the
> discussions, it would also be nice to have a real community discussion
> about these topics, where we discuss what the community would like, and not
> what view Alfresco Inc. has on it.
> 
> Regards,
> Torben
> 
> On 21/05/2015, at 22.15, Richard Esplin <richard.esplin at alfresco.com> wrote:
> > Community Edition is released under the LGPL, and is governed by the terms
> > of that license.
> > 
> > Alfresco is proud to be an open source company, and we are upfront that we
> > follow an open core model. We open source functionality that is part of
> > the
> > "open core" use case of core enterprise content management. Our Enterprise
> > Edition customers benefit from the existence of the open source product.
> > 
> > Sometimes I hear employees refer to our Enterprise Edition product as
> > "open
> > source". I always correct them. New employees now are recommended to take
> > a
> > one hour open source literacy training that I prepared. It has been some
> > time since I last found our marketing team misusing the label "open
> > source". If you are aware of that mistake in our current materials,
> > please let me know.
> > 
> > Our goal is to invest in a Community Edition product that meets the use
> > case of SME organizations that run in a single server environment. We
> > want Community Edition and Enterprise Edition to share as much code as
> > possible, so that our large scale customers get the benefits of open
> > source contributions.
> > 
> > The Community Edition source code is available in Subversion and on
> > GitHub.
> > You are welcome to spend your time developing features to reduce the
> > distinction between the two products. As you enhance Community Edition, we
> > recommend you also maintain as similar a code base as possible so as to
> > benefit from the broader community.
> > 
> > I am working on better defining what Alfresco means by "core ECM use
> > cases" and "SME organizations". Once I feel like we have definitions that
> > support the business models of our contributors, I'll publish them so
> > that there are clear expectations around how best to collaborate with us
> > on the product (should you choose to do so).
> > 
> > We want Community Edition to lead the industry and provide enough value
> > that you choose it for the organizations you support. But if Alfresco is
> > an important system for a profitable company, we hope you see the value
> > in purchasing Enterprise Edition for that client. Those purchases fund
> > our continued development of the open source product.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Richard
<snip>