Monday, 26 February 2007

Enterprise CMS Developer Alfresco Adopts GNU Public License

Alfresco Software, a provider of an open source enterprise content management solution, has said it will offer its next release under the GNU Public License (GPL), the software license.

While the GPL has been widely adopted by Linux distributors and open source infrastructure companies, Alfresco is leading what is expected to be an increasing number of open source application companies to adopt the GPL. Alfresco previously licensed its software under the Mozilla Public License with a clause requiring attribution. The move, which further grows and strengthens Alfresco's developer and OEM community, puts the company on a collision course with proprietary content management vendors and sets off what is expected to be a trend for open source application developers, the company said.

Adopting the GPL allows Alfresco to provide customers with community-supported software while proprietary companies continue to charge millions of dollars for similar but far less flexible and supportable applications. Alfresco has developed a content repository system designed to improve the collaboration, control and compliance of business documents, web content and associated business processes, as per a statement issued by the company.

"Moving Alfresco under the GPL makes a tough battle even tougher for those companies still shackled by proprietary licenses designed to control customers instead of empower them," said John Powell, CEO, Alfresco Software.

The re-licensing will not affect community users' rights in code they have accepted under the modified MPL prior to February 2007. However, if community customers download an update from Alfresco after the February 2007 release of Alfresco Community 2.0, the update will be covered by the GPL plus FLOSS exception. The Alfresco FLOSS Exception enables software provided under existing OSI-approved open source licenses to incorporate the Alfresco Community software without having to license the entire software package under the terms of the GPL. The license change does not affect Alfresco Enterprise customers or use of any software customers received from Alfresco prior to February release of Alfresco 2.0, the company said.