Over the last weeks Alfresco, Sonatype and WaveMaker made their own decisions about licensing.
Alfresco went LGPL, Sonatype – a company with a strong Apache background – for the very first time decided to release some code under GPL, while WaveMaker dumping the AGPL in favor of Apache.
Let’s have a closer look at how – and if – these changes reflect new business directions.
Alfresco meetup for community and customers took place here in Rome two weeks ago, featuring both John Newton and John Powell, respectively Alfresco CTO and CEO.
I asked few questions to John Powell, learning more about Alfresco licensing story, and about differences between Alfresco Enterprise Edition and Alfresco Labs.
Roberto, I never advocated a move to the Apache license. I simply raised a question. I’m surprised by the amount of misunderstanding that arises from it. Are people so stuck in their own way of thinking that they can’t allow others to ask questions and probe new ways of doing business?
You call our licensing history “hectic.” I call it progressive. We’ve consistently matched the right license for the right phase of the company’s development. I won’t pretend that we always knew exactly why we did X or Z, but then, who does?
You suggest our strategy makes it hard for us to work with governments, and yet government remains one of our top-three verticals. We’re making millions upon millions of dollars with government customers. I am bewildered by your suggestion there.
And as for Funambol, we have the same model (or very similar) as it does. The only difference is that Funambol has given up on trying to sell to enterprise customers, and this is our main type of customer. Other than that, there really is no difference.
So…I’m confused by your post a bit.
Hi Matt,
glad to hear back from you.
I said you start advocating a different license – Apache, not the BSD as I mistakenly wrote initially – because you wrote that Apache licensing could well be even better than GPL. I added I don’t think you will change the license, though. So said, changing three times in a row the license in a couple of years sounds a bit hectic to me. I totally agree we can name it also progressive. I made my personal guess (just a guess) towards GPLv3 in force of the fact that a company can change (for the better) its decisions.
Europe is now looking into open source procurement, did you read it the OSS procurement guideline draft? I would recommend at least the “Acquiring open source software without tenders” and “Tenders specifying open source software or open standards” paragraphs.
How do think proprietary vendors will face this issue?
The difference between Funambol’s and Alfresco’s approach is not merely the customer target, but in the way they distinguish customers from users.
The [Funambol] core value proposition it is about making carriers life easy to provision users’ phones, manage devices (creation, modification, etc) as well as send OTA commands. As a matter of fact enterprises do not need all these features and richness of configurations, and Funambol doesn’t need to upsell its community.
Similar differentiations happen elsewhere, think of how Sangoma funds open source projects delivering appliances that need to be certified (i.e. conformance testing). This is not a critic, but a fact: the client segment is an important building block of any so called (open source) business model.
I like Alfresco, and I linked three different Alfresco PRs giving a picture of how Alfresco’s business strategy is effective. Still I think it is interesting to express opinions on Alfresco’s strategy, maybe giving feedback in a constructive manner (like for the European public procurement thing).
Roberto Galoppini, and 
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