A Refresher Course on Alfresco

The ECM company Alfresco ought to occupy a special place in the open source pantheon for readers of this blog. As well as being one of the leading companies in its category, it shows how free software can meet the most demanding enterprise needs and – most importantly, perhaps – it's British by birth and location. As such, it offers a great example to others who might be contemplating an open source start-up, and proves that you don't have to be based in California to succeed in the world of computing.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Tamás Bíró, Sense/Net

Once hackers have stopped arguing whether it's “free software” or “open source”, and discussing the relative merits of GNOME or KDE, they can always get stuck into the perennial question of whether they ought to develop applications using Mono, tied as it is to Microsoft's .NET framework, or not....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Alfresco: the Samba of Enterprise Content Management

On Open Enterprise blog.

BPM + ECM = BPP

On Open Enterprise blog.

Less Dosh for OSS...And So?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Alfresco Sees the (GPL) Light

So, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company Alfresco has moved from the Mozilla Public Licence to the GNU General Public Licence (with the horribly-named "FLOSS exception"). This is good for Alfresco, and good for the GPL commons. It's also a nice confirmation of some of the things I was saying in this recent article about licensing, with the witty title "Lizenz zum Geldverdienen". Oh, yes, it's, er, in German (but an English version should follow in in due course).

The Land of Lost (Enterprise) Content (Management)

ECM - enterprise content management - may seem like a highly obscure field. It's actually critical important to businesses, but what interests me more is that this is one of four or five fields where open source is going to clean up soon.

So this post by Matt Asay about John Newton's thoughts on ECM consolidation caught my attention. For what it's worth, I shall be weighing in on this subject in due course (but don't hold your breath).

The Once and Future Lock-In

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is not going to win any prizes for excitement, but it's important: it's a matter of how companies keep all their organisational stuff these days. So this piece warning about Microsoft's attempt to lock users into its standards at the content repository level makes a good point.

And as it also points out, there's now plenty of open source ECM software out there: Alfresco, eZ Publish, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone - so there's really no reason to take the one-way road to Redmond.