Alfresco 2.0 goes GPL

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:56:37 GMT

I see that Alfresco has been re-licensed under the GPL, to a model that is quite similar to that of MySQL. I've come across a lot of fear of the GPL in the Java world over the years so until Java demonstrated that it was possible to get past that fear I would have thought this was a bad idea.

I happened to be talking to John Newton earlier today and I asked him if the Java/GPL thing inspired him. He said:

We have been thinking about this for a long time. Some of us were not super comfortable with the attribution clause. [in the old BSD license] Matt Asay, who has been looking at open source licenses for a long time and is on the OSI board, has been a big advocate of GPL.
When it became clear that you could legally combine other non-GPL components (e.g. Apache and BSD) into a GPL package and the FLOSS exception that MySQL developed was really taking hold, then it was just a matter of time. Timing around the Java initiative was coincidental.

It's also good to see that they are now eating their own dog-food: Alfresco can now host Alfresco, because they've added a new Web content management section. (Hey Matt: your CMS eval was a year and a half early!)

John's blog has an up-to-date new features list:

Simple import of existing web sites
Simple Xforms-based entry of XML data based upon the open source Chiba project with AJAX extensions
Templating of XML and HTML based upon XSLT and Freemarker
Virtual sandboxes for staging of web sites without copying files
Timeline snapshot of web sites with zero effort
Standard web production workflows extending the JBoss jBPM engine with group and queue support

Joe Walker - gpl tag

Alfresco 2.0 goes GPL