Content Log

The Start of Open Source

I have been researching the origins of open source recently and realized that I had missed an important anniversary last year.

On a very rainy day in early February 1998, a group of people very familiar with free software met at the Palo Alto home of Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute. Many in the free software movement felt that they were on the verge of something very big. Netscape had just announced that it would make its source code freely available. Influenced by an article by Eric Raymond called the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the management at Netscape came to the conclusion that this was the way to build software. Chris invited Eric, Michael Tiemann, Larry Augustin, John Hall, Todd Anderson and Sam Ockman to session to discuss the unique opportunity of publicity this would create and how best to present the free software movement to business as a whole. Chris's living room provided a venue to brainstorm on new ways to brand free software.

The heavy presence not in that room was Richard Stallman - RMS. Richard Stallman provided a Patrick Henry-like defense of free software in a "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" sort of way. Although the group agreed and aligned with the principles of free software - free to share, free to choose, free to reuse, free to distribute, RMS's uncompromising stance on the term "free software" inhibited business users from taking up free software. Although business users of free software, particularly younger, early adopters, could agree and sympathize with these principles, they were suspicious of anything free. The term was too closely related to freeware or shareware that was usually a one-man outfit that relied on the contributions of those who liked the software. Freeware did not mean that the source code was freely available, so meant that there was generally no one else to work on the product to improve or fix it. RMS felt that this called for education, not stepping away from the term free that emphasized the principles of freedom.

The concept of open and free software has actually been around as long as their have been computers. Universities, in particular, had freely shared software and collaborated between each other to create new programs and new software systems. The Unix operating system and its successor Linux owe much to this early open, collaborative and free development of software. However, up until this date, the closest thing to describe this concept, process and set of values was the Free Software Foundation and the principles listed on its web site. However, the confusion of the word "free" and stridency of the Free Software Foundation's founder, RMS, was putting off business people. All the people in the room had experienced the frustration of pushing free software. As Sam Ockman pointed out, "People are cynical; they expect higher costs of ownership with anything that is labeled as 'free.' 'If I don’t pay now, I’ll pay later,' was a common mindset I encountered from IT buyers." Even worse was "Free? That sounds like communism!" I have to admit that I fell into that camp.

The group in Palo Alto felt that presented with an opportunity as big and important as Netscape adopting an approach of free software development, they must make the most of it. They had two objectives, to help make Netscape successful in its venture into free software and how could they take advantage of the publicity surrounding this release. With the second goal in mind, they took the approach of essentially rebranding free software. Eric Raymond, who had authored an influential essay on free software, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, felt the traditional term, "free software," had been a millstone around all of their necks, and was a nonstarter as rhetoric to convince any but the hard-core believers. Michael Tiemann had been running the oldest company selling free software, Cygnus Software, and was equally frustrated. As Michael put it, "We wanted a term that was more resonant with the business benefits rather than the moral arguments."

The session was not very long, perhaps about two or three hours. Michael Tiemann advocated the "source ware". Christine Peterson, a futurist from the Foresight Institute, liked the term "Open Source". Eric Raymond carried a lot of influence in this discussion. He was the one that had helped to persuade Netscape to go with free software. He was also an articulate spokesperson for the development methodology and a self-professed extrovert. Eric liked the term "Open Source" as well and open source carried the day.

A few days later, Eric raised the call to dump "free software" and start to use "open source".  The divide between Free Software and Open Source could not be clearer. Later that month, the Open Source Initiative was formed by Eric and Bruce Perens. Bruce's definition of principles of Debian Linux were used as the guiding principles of Open Source. In April, Tim O'Reilly brought together all the influencers and thinkers of the free software movement including Linus Torvalds of Linux fame and Brian Behlendorf of Apache. As is typical of open source and legalese, the passive statement was issued that "a vote was taken" to call the movement "Open Source". Tim called his conference the Open Source Conference from there on. RMS still hung on to the importance of freedom and the term "Free Software". He also complained about being "written out of history." However, the principles had generally not changed, only the tone, just as a new ruling government would take after a revolution.

With Netscape now open source and everyone other than the Free Software Foundation using the term, open source really took off. By coinciding with the massive explosion of internet and the most widely used software of the web being the open source Apache web server, open source could only accelerate. It also didn't hurt that on May 14, 1998 that Janet Reno caught Microsoft completely off guard by filing anti-monopoly charges against Microsoft. This set a white hat / black hat positioning that continues to galvanize the open source community. Although it would take some years for Mozilla, the reformed Netscape browser, to take off with Firefox, to take off, the launch of open source certainly caught IBM's attention. A little over a year later, IBM would commission the Bowen report and decide to move their tools and Unix businesses toward open source and Linux. Red Hat launched its enterprise business after acquiring Cygnus and really displace both existing proprietary Unix system and Windows systems with an enterprise grade Linux.

The business momentum stalled a bit after the Dot Com Crash, but open source did not miss a beat. The value of open source became crystal clear to a lot of people in the constraints of a recession, just as they are doing now. Open Source didn't really start with the name open source, but it certainly accelerated from that point and the timing couldn't have been better.

Twittering My Life Away

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll!

John Lennon - Watching the Wheels, 1980

Earlier this year, I said that I would blog more, what I should have said, but didn't really realize was I would micro-blog more. I have been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, even though I signed up two years ago in April 2007. Back then, I couldn't really tell what the point was. What could you actually communicate in 140 characters. In fact, the founders of Twitter back then saw it more of a tool to merge mobile SMS with web. Now, I guess I can't get enough of it. Find me at @johnnewton

As some people in Alfresco started to get into Twitter more and saw how other open source projects were using it, I became more curious. However, it really took off for me in mid-January. People who I tracked and respected were also on Twitter and they were putting up the links, blogs and thoughts that influenced them. This became a much better way to dissect the blogosphere and understand what was going on. I also found great advice on Twitter that said think of it as a river - you don't drink the river, you drink from the river. If you don't try to consume the whole think but just sample, you will find it a much more satisfying experience.

I started to find the mini-content compelling. I also found the power of the Retweet (RT) and started to pass on what I was reading as well. I asked my friends on Twitter what tools should I use on my Mac to consume Twitter and learned about TweetDeck, a great multi-channel Tweet machine. If you are familiar with the concept in psychology of Flow, Twitter had all the flow of a video game and what became clear was that it was simpler and more addictive than Facebook, which had become more of an occasional dalliance for me. The multi-channel input of TweetDeck, Web and SMS, meant that I could share what I was doing at conferences and meetings like the CMIS face to face or the Accel Stanford Symposium.

It's really like getting sucked into a vortex once you realize what Twitter is. But it is really hard to describe. Some people have described it as a very simple, disciplined email of 140 characters. Eric Schmidt poo-poo'ed it as a poor man's email. John Battelle described it as real-time indexing of live conversations, which he said is "insanely interesting". Anyone who is addicted to it, knows that it is so much more than any of those. It is an open API, which means that there are lots of tools like the Twittercounter that allows you to chart the growth of your followers. Or the addictive Twitterfall that I refuse to go near again, because I would never get out. It is also a community of people that you can ask any question and probably get an answer. There is also constant tagging of information with the # character linking to any subject such as #Alfresco. This makes it a very powerful search tool. It also makes it a constantly moving and evolving taxonomy based upon people and concepts that is self-adapting.

I have been struggling to find a metaphor for Twitter and have yet to find one. A roman forum where everyone gathers? A party telephone line where anyone can listen in on your conversation and you know that's what's happening? Twitter really is something new and something evolutionary at the same time. It's extremely simple. The open API makes it extremely adaptable. And there are hundreds of your friends telling you what's on their mind and what they are looking at or doing. Everyone seemed to be acutely aware of my trip to DC with my son. It was extremely cool to share thoughts with the whole world during Obama's inauguration. It's search. It's a categorization of the world.

It's also growing hyperbolicly. Look at the stats on alexa.com. No wonder Facebook felt compelled to copy Twitter. It is really, really addictive. I have found ways to control use, but I have no intention of stopping as some people have. What I have found is that peak impact of anything I write is between the hours of 4pm and 7pm GMT, so I can spend some time posting then. It is also much quieter in the morning UK time, so it is a good time to see what is going on in the world. Much better than the portals or even news sites, although it doesn't completely replace them -- yet.

There are already spoofs on Twitter that talk about the next big thing after Twitter. There is even talk about nano-blogs, whatever they are. I can't really imagine what's next, but I think Twitter probably still has an amazing future going forward.

Building a stronger open source product

It has been fascinating to watch the Alfresco community grow over the last few years. We really had no idea what the shape would be when we started and who would adopt our product and our project. Since 2005, we have been joined by some great world-class companies, household brands and some of the best names in small and medium size businesses. We are very pleased with the adoption of both the open source and enterprise products. What we are puzzled about though is that some of the biggest enterprises in the world (and I mean Fortune 50 and even Fortune 10) are only using the open source version of the product. We have designed our enterprise services specifically to cater to this type of customer.

Some open source systems try to prevent companies using their free version by either crippling their non-enterprise products or by letting their open source versions run into a destabilized state. Back in 2006, we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to hinder the open source version of the product. To hinder the product would make it difficult for certain governments to use our product and would encourage the community to build around imposed limitations. We don't want to provide you with a crippled version, because it doesn't really do the product justice when you try it. And we are trying to provide you with one of the biggest benefits of open source, eliminating lock-in to proprietary software. In fact, in the latest release of Alfresco, we went well out of our way to incorporate many of the changes that we have been putting into place for our enterprise customers into the Labs version of Alfresco.

MySQL has been experimenting with changes to their business model recently that attempts to draw a line on what is fair in open source. After all, it is the revenue that is generated from the enterprise subscription that helps fund, grow and improve the freely available open source version. When Matt, John and I met with Jonathan Schwartz last year, he said that he felt that it is important to have a completely open source core and system, but that in order to have the tools to run MySQL in production or in a high scale, high availability environment, it is only fair to have those tools be available as enterprise and for purchase. Interesting concept, but does it work?

We took some time earlier this year to consider what was fair and what are the core principles to which we want to adhere. We tried to determine where it is right to charge for a service or a function and where do we defend a capability as open source. If we are held to account, these are the principles that I expect we can apply with transparency, consistency and fairness:

• We must insure that customers using our enterprise version are not locked into that choice and that open source is available to them. To that end, the core system and interfaces will remain 100% open source.
• We will provide service and customer support that provides insurance that systems will run as expected and correct problems according our promised Service Level Agreement
• Enterprise customers will receive fixes as a priority, but that we will make these fixes available in the next labs release. Bugs fixed by the community are delivered to the community as a priority.
• We will provide extensions and integrations to proprietary systems to which customers are charged. It is fair for us to charge and include this in an enterprise release as well.
• Extensions and integrations to ubiquitous proprietary systems, such as Windows and Office, will be completely open source.
• Extensions that are useful to monitor or run a system in a scaled or production environment, such as system monitoring, administration and high availability, are fair to put into an enterprise release.

We started with Alfresco 3 to put extensions to proprietary databases such as Oracle or SQL Server into the enterprise release only, while extensions to MySQL, Ingres and other open source databases were available in open source. Now with the Alfresco Enterprise 3.1, we will be adding system monitoring capabilities and easy clustering administration that will only be available as part of the enterprise version. This does not prevent the open source version from being a very usable or even scalable system. However, we believe it provides an incentive for those large enterprises that have not chosen the enterprise system to do so, because it significantly reduces their costs of deployment and scalability, as well as providing them the help and support they need for deployment. These enterprise subscriptions help provide the resources that make a stronger and more functional open source release. The enterprise subscriptions also insure that production systems will be up and running. We still provide this enterprise system at a cost that is still less than 10% of proprietary systems.

We want to make both our enterprise and community users successful. The more people download, install and use the community version successfully, the more they will put it into production and look to an enterprise subscription as an insurance policy for that production system. The enterprise subscription is designed to save time and money and be more cost effective than supporting the labs product yourself. Alfresco is in a unique position to offer this. In all situations, we want our users to be able to choose the best option for them.

We are making these changes in a way that is based on a set of principles that are fair and accountable. We believe in open source and making it freely available and providing choice of not just proprietary systems, but between enterprise and open source. We think the rest of the open source world is heading in a similar direction, because this is what makes open source stronger in the long run. However, we are interested in what you think. Please drop me a line with your thoughts, ideas and concerns.

Happy Birthday US Space Program

 
From the Smithsonian National Aeronautics and Space Museum, which John Powell and I visited during the Washington Alfresco Community Conference in Oct 2008

My birthday, January 31st, is always the anniversary of the US space program. On the very same day I was born, the US sent it's first successfult satellite into orbit. The Soviets had sent Sputnik up about three months prior and most the US attempts had ended in spectacular explosions. Still, we had the better German scientists and got to the moon first.

This was the dawn of what became know for the next decade as the "Space Age". Everything in the news paper above (click on it for blow up) seems quaint and a different time. Most the parts that were used you can probably find in a Radio Shack today. Still it was enough to discover the Van Allen Radiation Belt on the day I was born. Since then, the space program and the race to the moon ushered in the next age, the Information Age followed by the Internet Age. Let's just hope we're not going into the Dark Ages.

Because my birthday was on this anniversary, NASA often sent up various space shots on Jan 31st. I had my fair share of launches, like some of the first Space Shuttles, various Apollo and Gemini flights. I also had my fair share of disasters around my birthday. Both Apollo 1 and Challenger disasters were on days that I was celebrating my birthday. However, most of the time I had a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm around Space. I would suspect that most of my generation that entered into software were inspired by the Space program and learned science and mathematics because of the investment made in these areas as a result of the Space program. I look forward to new enthusiasm and launches with the new Ares program.

It wasn't called NASA then, but happy anniversary NASA and travels in outer space. To infinity and beyond!

CMIS Face to Face at Microsoft in Redmond

Dave Caruana and I just finished participating the in the first Face to Face of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee here in Redmond, WA. Companies participating in person were IBM, Oracle, EMC, Alfresco, Exalead, OpenText, SAP, Day, Nuxeo, Dennis Hamilton (representing himself), and of course, Microsoft. Gary Gershon, Julian Reshke from Greenbytes and Betsy Fanning from AIIM participated by phone. (Sorry if I missed anyone.) Virtually everyone in the Enterprise Content Management market. The tone of the meeting was very cooperative and collaborative. David Choy from EMC is the chair of the committee and did a good job of staying neutral on the issues. Al Brown from IBM/FileNet is the secretary for the bindings and Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft is the secretary for the data model. All three did an excellent job keeping things on track and discussing all the open issues. Most of us have all worked together before in both the JCR meetings and iECM meetings and that made collaboration a lot easier. Dennis and I even go back to ODMA and DMA - over 15 years ago.

(BTW, I micro-blogged what was going on Twitter. CMIS Tweets are below. You can follow me on http://twitter.com/johnnewton)

The CMIS effort so far has been use case driven with the main use cases being collaborative content management, integration into portals, mashups and search. There are a number of use cases that explicitly out of scope, such as records management and web content management. Some use cases lie in between where the main application may not be addressed, but we want to allow developers to create applications that may access the information that may be created by other out-of-scope applications. An example that we discussed a lot was records management. We don't want CMIS to be so complex that you can build a records management system, but you may want to access records information for the purposes of eDiscovery.

These use cases that are in-scope seem to be clear and compelling enough that we all agreed that we urgently want to get CMIS to market to get people building these applications. Although this was one of the last thing that we discussed, it is the most impressive outcome of the meeting. There was so much agreement and consensus in the meeting that we all felt it is important to meet the deadline of having CMIS complete before the end of the year. David Choy did a great job outlining the OASIS process and what must be done. The bureaucracy (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) of the OASIS process is such that the minimum time that it takes to get from public review to standard is 6 months. So we all agreed a timeline that would get this done. This means that the spec will be ready for public review by the end of Spring. That's a mean feat, but all agreed doable with few obstacles in the way. It also means that the 0.5 spec going into the OASIS process was pretty solid.

That doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty to discuss. It was a three day event after all and we used it all up. The most controversial issues were around security and what is truly RESTful. The Security proposal was presented by SAP who have a real need to secure documents consistently with the SAP system. This was an excellent use case and provided a real-world example from which to work and focused on Access Control Lists. Most of us have been involved in round and round discussions on security and I'm not quite sure how we got to a general consensus. We are not quite done, but we all seem to have a great deal of agreement. A subcommittee will work on this some more. I had proposed a more abstract Policy interface prior to OASIS submission based upon work that we have done in iECM and JSR-283. After discussing this with David Pitfield of Oracle, I think we need to think about that one some more. (Sorry James McGovern, but XACML was shot down in flames. For the reasons why, please see this IBM article on implementing ACLs with XACML and look how horrible ACLs look. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xacml/)

David Nuescheler, who is the chair of the JSR-283 committee and CTO of Day Software, presented a couple of discussions in collaboration with Julian Reschke. Julian is also on the WebDAV committee and brings a unique perspective. David presented some of the thoughts that originated with Roy Fielding, also from Day, on whether the REST binding is really RESTful. Although there are arguments to not call the Atom Pub protocol REST bindings, we all felt it was important to communicate our intentions toward REST. In the end, we will call the protocol support RESTful Atom Pub bindings or something like that. David suggested perhaps exploring protocols other than Atom Pub, such as WebDAV. Apparently, these were ruled out quite a while ago and there are already WebDAV standards bodies. Decision is to continue with Atom Pub. Julian, who also seems to know HTTP extremely well, logged many issues around how CMIS uses / abuses HTTP and most of his recommendations are being incorporated into the spec.

David also raised the issue of reference implementations. In the end, we all agreed that we are all making progress on our own implementations and that a reference implementation wasn't necessary. There was interest and probably continues to be interest in an open Test Compliance Kit (TCK), but we all agreed that a clearer spec should be the primary point of reference rather than a TCK. It may be up to us, the open source vendors, to come up with a TCK. We have already created both a Java and .NET test harness to test CMIS access. Even Microsoft said that if you need a free CMIS test platform, you can get Alfresco. :-)

As the spec has developed, we have all been prototyping our implementations. The early implementors (Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP - in alphabetical order :-)) participated in an interoperability session or "plug-fest" at a Redmond interop lab in August prior to making the spec public. And it worked! It is a real testament to the fact that this is becoming a real standard. In other words, it works. This is part of the reason that there is not as much demand for a reference implementation. It is also part of the reason that it continues to develop and have such momentum. By working with each other to test each others implementations, we are discovering what needs to be tweaked in our software and what needs to be fixed in the spec. Another interop session is planned sometime around AIIM as well as a demo that the AIIM conference is organizing and sponsoring.

In addition, we were able to demonstrate our integrations with CMIS. IBM showed Quickr accessing CMIS. Day showed a prototype that they are working on that sits on Jackrabbit. Dave showed some new components that we are working on with Share and the Joomla and Drupal integrations with Alfresco using CMIS. Microsoft and EMC had shown their integrations in previous interop sessions.

There were a few other issues that we discussed. OpenText presented hierarchical properties. I presented a proposal on how to deal with Aspects or Mixins. A little more than half the systems represented, some like Oracle and IBM had more than one, support some notion similar to Aspects - think of them as data type plug-ins. The vendors that have broad search requirements had a great deal of interest in Universal Search (really a new use case) and want to see access to change logs to simplify indexing new or changed documents in ECM systems. However, I think we all agree that we don't want any of these to hold up a 1.0 of the specification and getting CMIS out to market.

CMIS has momentum. It will be a real specification. We all seem to agree on what we want and what our customers need. Companies are implementing it. IBM, EMC and Alfresco have released 0.5 implementations. Microsoft can't talk about what they are doing, but they will. (They would probably have to kill me if I knew exactly what they are doing. ;-)) It could be more and it can probably be better, but CMIS that is out there and implemented will be better than the perfect spec coming out much later.

Microsoft were gracious hosts and provided with good facilities and food. (Just replace the projector bulb. :-)) Thanks very much Ethan!

If you are interested, CMIS Tweets follow:

• Discussing CMIS use cases: Collab Content Mgmt, Portals, Mashups, Search
• Open use case issues: Observation, tagging, data dict., better REST bindings - less verbose
• Can't use MSN Messenger inside of Microsoft on their guest network. Bizarre.
• Going thru introductions, including favorite color. (Hmm.) Should note that SAP and OpenText are also here.
• Interesting discussion on reference implementation. Decision that Tech Committee will not implement ref impl.
• TC agrees that we need well documented test cases. Lots of interest in a Test Compat Kit.
• Show and tell coming up. Day and Lotus.
• Tomorrow will be REST design (with input from Roy Fielding via David Nuescheler), schema design and various issues.
• Now discussing REST issues. David Nuescheler is bringing up the issues first raised by Roy Fielding who first described REST.
• Discussed REST at length. Staying with Atom Pub, but will look at browser-based Javascript libraries.
• Gary Gershon is reviewing the SOAP bindings for CMIS.
• David Nuescheler: "There is no such thing as a REST binding. REST is an architecture."
• It is very difficult to concentrate on the minutiae of SOAP web services. (zzzzzz)
• Ethan (MSFT) now discussing unified search.
• Long discussion on universal search and relationship to observation. Universal search indexing looks like a MUST. Obs is SHOULD.
• Dave Caruana is demonstrating Alfresco SURF and CMIS.
• Dave Caruana just demonstrated Joomla and Drupal integrated with Alfresco thru CMIS.
• Just got caught out. I'm supposed to talk about data dictionaries and I don't remember what the issue was. :( Jet Lag!
• Long discussion on ACLs proposed by SAP. No appetite for XACML. Sorry James McGovern. Keeping it very simple.
• I was very surprised at Microsoft's interest in content crawling and Universal Search. Lumped into Observation discussion y'day.
• Just finished presenting how to do Mixins / Aspects in CMIS. Some want to model as related objects. How would you do it?
• Just finished OpenText proposal on "Hierarchical Properties"
• Question on the table - What do we need to do to finish the proposal?
• After lunch, group photo! Courtesy of Dennis Hamilton.
• Now batching.
• Discussing timeline for CMIS and flowcharted process. We are remarkably close! But min 6 months.
• Let me clarify. Get to public review in under 6 months.
• Closing out most open issues on spec from the Technical Committee.
• Would love to see Adobe here.
• Successful CMIS face to face complete! :-)

Alfresco Labs 3 Special Inaugural Release

 

Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

"It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom." - President Barack Obama, January 20, 2008

How do you put out a release on one of the biggest days in history? The answer is you don’t, you wait until the day after and create a new beginning.

I’m pleased to announce that the final release of the open source Alfresco Labs 3.0. Alfresco Labs 3 has been our most important version of Alfresco yet. Combining new technologies, new techniques, new standards and new levels of ease of use, we have been fulfilling a lot of the vision that we had when we started Alfresco four years ago. This release combines the stabilization work that we have been working on in the enterprise release with new innovations specifically for the open source community.

The Alfresco Labs 3 releases that started in summer of last year have been aimed at expanding our collaboration and social computing initiatives and to providing an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. In doing so, we have introduced a number of new capabilities that have not been seen in either commercial or open source systems:

• The first implementation of the new CMIS specification that is now in the standardization process with OASIS and promises to become the SQL of content management. Both the REST-based Atom Publishing Protocol and SOAP Web Services are provided.
• The first ECM implementation of the Microsoft SharePoint protocol after publication of the protocol by Microsoft in April 2008.
• New SURF, REST-enabled web runtime to provide an AJAX-enabled set of content management and collaboration components that utilize the rich Yahoo YUI AJAX libraries.
• Alfresco Share, which is a new collaboration application built using our WCM technology and provides on-demand collaboration sites integrated with SURF collaboration and Microsoft Office integration through the SharePoint protocol.
• New SURF collaboration components including wikis, blogs, forums, calendars, discussions, and social tagging.
• A new document management experience with the SURF-based document library that includes thumbnail and preview generation to avoid long downloads and eliminates the need to have the application locally with a Flash-based preview.
• Continued innovation of our WCM platform introducing features from the most recent enterprise release including web farm deployment, virtualization and reuse of assets between web sites. We have also converted much of the WCM functionality into Web Scripts that are accessible from you SURF applications.
• Multi-tenant capability to create virtual instances of Alfresco from a single machine.
• Managing in-bound email to collaboration sites for email-based collaboration.
• Integration of native PHP interpretation with the Caucho Quercus interpreter for integration of PHP applications and development of Web Script and SURF components in PHP.
• The new Web Studio drag and drop web site development tool designed to develop SURF sites and applications.

Perhaps most important is the fact that the enterprise and open source lines were merged to provide bug fixes found by our customers or through the certification process on a multitude of platforms. Since the majority of our enterprise customers start using Alfresco as a result of using the open source version first, it is in our interests to have a viable, robust open source implementation of Alfresco. We also believe that ultimately the primary reason people are buying the enterprise subscription is for support, warranty and indemnification and the fact that Alfresco is open source is what draws them in the first place. We therefore recommend that the community upgrade to this version of Alfresco as soon as possible.

There are still new features being introduced for the first time as part of this release. Web Studio is new separate application using the new SURF web framework to provide a drag and drop design experience to build SURF web sites and applications. Web Studio allows you to work with and view the web site you are developing, but uses the Yahoo YUI AJAX libraries. Web Studio is also designed to develop and edit web sites safely by using the new WCM REST-based Web Scripts and is fully interoperable with the Alfresco WCM application.

With the economy in the dumps, this is a particularly propitious time to release the stable open source version of Alfresco 3.0. Open source should thrive in this environment. Where companies and IT organizations may not even take a call from a traditional enterprise salesperson, they will download open source software. We want to be able to build market share in the ECM market with open source that is robust and thriving.

Happy New Year and Happy Birthday Alfresco

So my New Year resolutions contain all the usual suspects – lose weight, exercise more, blah, blah, blah. But perhaps the most important, dear reader is to blog more. I have written several times how hard it is to blog, very much like trying to work yourself up to exercising. Thus, what better way to start again than to review the year 2008, then work myself up for tomorrow’s Looking Forward to 2009, which is a bit like getting ready for that 5k run after sitting at the desk for so long. (BTW, yesterday the manager of the local gym said he has not seen a membership card like mine for several years. :-( But at least I went. :-) )

First of all, 2008 was my 50th birthday year and I decided to celebrate by taking down the entire world’s financial system. Just kidding. I read just before my birthday that the time of least happiness for a man is supposed to be 50. But I have found this year very satisfying both professionally and personally, despite what happened to my portfolio. It helps that Alfresco is doing so well and I find working in open source so fulfilling. So a bit about the last year at Alfresco…

In 2008, two threads of our strategy came together and we have been actually working on these since our founding in 2005. The first is to implement the Microsoft SharePoint protocol to allow Microsoft Office users to access Alfresco the same way that they would access SharePoint. The second is to join with the largest players in the Enterprise Content Management space in developing a standard for the industry, hopefully an SQL for content management. These came together in our Alfresco 3 platform that also included the social computing application, Alfresco Share, and our new web framework, Surf.

It has always been our belief that Microsoft SharePoint was going to have a substantial impact on the enterprise content management industry and that the primary reason for this is the special lock that SharePoint has on Microsoft Office. We chose to release CIFS shared file system emulation first, but had always intended to implement the SharePoint protocol for Office. This summer, thanks to a deal worked out between the European Union and Microsoft, we were able to do that much more easily than we expected. This has been really popular with our enterprise customers since its release in July.

CMIS took the industry by surprise primarily because it is so long overdue that many people thought it would never come. After ODMA, DMA, JCR and iECM, the gorillas in the marketplace, Microsoft, IBM and EMC felt it was better to work together to create a bigger pie. We have been working with these three for the last year, along with OpenText, SAP and BEA, now Oracle. David Caruana has been very active in the REST/ATOM protocols and we were ready to deliver our implementation quickly. We all participated in interoperability fest at Redmond in August to prove that the web services and REST specifications would work. We had been working with SAP and BEA already as they used Alfresco as a reference implementation upon which to build clients for the August session. When CMIS was publicly announced in September prior to submission to OASIS, we were ready with an implementation based upon the 0.5 specifications.

The Alfresco 3 platform was the big focus of the engineering group this year and became the vehicle for both CMIS and the SharePoint protocol. The Alfresco 3 platform was developed to get people collaborating on documents and to enable new types of social applications. We started with the functionality we required in Alfresco 2.9, but found that the Java Server Faces UI infrastructure was holding us back. So we made the decision to move to a more Web 2.0, REST and scripting-oriented development environment, which we named Surf and was based upon the REST-based work of Web Scripts that we started in 2007. The social functionality that we created – activity feeds, calendars, blogs, wikis, etc. – were created as components and packaged as a site-oriented collaboration application, Alfresco Share, which can be used both inside and outside the firewall. Share is designed around our Web Content Management platform and you can use Surf / Share components in creating new web sites.

Open source has proven to be a good community and business strategy for Alfresco in 2008. It helps though to have someone responsible for it and Nancy Garrity has made tremendous progress in the last year as she has ramped up participation in the forums, wiki and the forge. With Web Scripts and Surf, we have increased the number of projects and contributions. A couple of contributions that I thought were pretty cool this year were FlexSpaces, a Flex/Air client by Steve Reiner, and Plutext, a collaborative simultaneous-editing Word add-in by Jason Harrop. In addition, JoomlaTools, founded by the chief architect of Joomla 1.5 Johan Janssens, built an integration with Alfresco to Joomla, the popular open source CMS, using our CMIS implementation. There are likely to be more CMIS-based applications and contributions as CMIS moves closer to standard later in the year.

Business has gone very well despite the economic slowdown. I wrote over a year ago that it seemed like a recession was coming and we have been prepared by being prudent and not over-extending ourselves. Credit goes to CEO John Powell who holds on very tightly to the strings of a very mean purse. Still we more than doubled the number of enterprise customers while continuing to provide more functionality to the open source community side. You can expect more in the new year. You can also expect that we will do well in the recession as we provide similar functionality to the larger ECM systems at 10% of the price.

From a personal perspective, it was a great year with loads of travel to tropical climes, my son getting in Winchester College, my daughter doing so well in horse riding and ballet, and my wife throwing a completely surprising surprise birthday party. The World Economic Forum in Davos in January was still very much a highlight like last year, especially meeting so many famous people. Just when you finally figure out what’s going on, it’s all over. I also got to develop my interests in photography with a great photography course in Tuscany.

With the new year, it is more or less the fourth birthday of Alfresco. So thanks everyone for your support, happy new year and let’s ride 2009 to new heights. Thanks everyone at Alfresco for all the great and hard work. And thanks everyone in the engineering organization for such a fantastic product.

Alfresco releases first CMIS implementation

The same day that the Large Hadron Collider starts unlocking the mysteries of the universe at CERN in Geneva, the enterprise content management community has decided to explore what would happen if we could all interoperate between each of our respective systems and content could be tapped into with a common set of services. For the ECM industry, this day could prove to be just as momentous. EMC, IBM and Microsoft just announced a new content service interface along with Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. The result could unlock the huge potential of the content contained within enterprises and unleash its power for discovery, customer service and knowledge sharing in the same way that databases have become the backbone of many businesses. On this occasion, we are releasing our CMIS implementation of this specification as open source.

A whole new universe of content possibilities

The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) promises to become the SQL for Content Management. There have been previous attempts to create a universal standard for ECM, but none of them (ODMA, DMA, JCR) got further than a few vendors supporting it. The difference now is that the largest vendors, IBM, Microsoft and EMC have been joined by Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP to not just endorse this specification, but actually create working versions of the protocol. There is real wood behind the arrow, not just a lot of talk. With the results of an interoperability session, this group of companies will submit this specification for standardization by OASIS.

The only other parallel that I can think of for this type of industry collaboration is when the database industry decided to standardize SQL and its language bindings in the early 1990s. Bitter rivals realized that a bigger pie was in everyone's interest and would encourage greater application development and enterprise adoption. This collaboration resulted in a huge growth of the database industry, the creation of the client-server industry yielding SAP, Siebel, Documentum and Business Objects, and within a few years, the creation of the web and web applications. If the resulting standard creates even a fraction of this success, it can have a significant impact on IT, applications and web sites.

Having been involved in some of the preliminary discussions in iECM, the AIIM alliance that resulted in the CMIS alliance, I find the development of the two flavors of CMIS, SOAP and REST, very interesting. One world, the SOA world of web services, represents the operational, records-oriented roots of ECM where integration with structured business processes is important. The other, REST and Web 2.0-oriented services, represents the melding of content in the enterprise with the social content being created by Web 2.0, business communities and the social networks of companies. The REST style of interface also fits the growing Cloud Computing world much better. It became impossible to select one over the other. Each will find its own purpose. However, having a common set of data models and semantics makes it much easier for vendors fit in both worlds.

Having anticipated CMIS for some time, Alfresco is pleased to announce the first implementation of this specification. We have been anticipating and planning for this day since Alfresco’s creation at the beginning of 2005 and have been architecting the system to support both web services and a REST architecture. David Caruana, Alfresco's Chief Architect, has built our Web Scripts architecture to simplify the creation of CMIS-like services. Since CMIS is based upon the ATOM Publishing Protocol, it meant that we have a pre-existing standard to model how Web Scripts can be modeled and built. We were able to demonstrate interoperability of web scripts and our web services along with other CMIS implementations at the recent Plugfest in Redmond in August.

As we release our latest recommended version of Alfresco Labs 3, you can now try CMIS for yourself. Included are both the REST and the SOAP implementations as a prototyping platform. In addition, we have the latest version of the new SURF platform that simplifies building Web 2.0 types of applications and will increasingly be used to create CMIS applications and components as well. To complete the package, we are also delivering the latest version of Alfresco Share, which we anticipate will become a popular application for accessing not just Alfresco content, but other content in the future. We are very excited about what the future holds for CMIS, SURF, and Share. I would like to thank the Alfresco team for the hard work that they have put into building Share and SURF as next generation content applications and application platforms.

If you want to learn, explore and experiment with CMIS, you can download the Alfresco Labs 3 here. You can join the discussion on CMIS here.

We congratulate EMC, IBM and Microsoft in setting aside their differences to create a common set of interfaces that will create a much bigger market for everyone and solve many customers problems of interoperability. We are proud to be part of the initial submission of this milestone stage in the development of the content management market.

Brainstorming at Fortune Brainstorm in Half Moon Bay, CA

Groucho Marx once said, "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." That was my original concern about attending the Fortune Brainstorm, a three day technology conference in Half Moon Bay California. I met one of the conference organizers, David Kirkpatrick at a couple of the World Economic Forum events and he is a very bright and insightful guy. But I thought it might be another one of these conferences where you spend a lot of money just to attend. Our marketing team convinced me otherwise.

Brainstorm last week was a very connected event with some very influential people. I recognized at least a quarter of them from Davos. The bloggers were also there in force with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Kara Swisher participating as the first evenings entertainment. The subject matter was also generally more relevant that Davos as well given its proximity to Silicon Valley. Given how far I came, I used part of the time on Monday to do some interviews in San Francisco on our Alfresco Labs 3 launch, so I missed the opening sessions with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Brad Smith from Intuit. The setting for most of this was somewhat intimate with main room laid out like a giant conference room with lots of Herman Miller executive chairs. (Herman Miller was a sponsor.)

The environment was set up like an office. So everyone ends up doing work.

Although this was a tech conference, some of the focus was on how relevant tech is. The level of discussion was what you would expect in an article in Fortune magazine. That level of discussion is good to understand how the big trends are moving to affect everyone's lives, not just those in tech. The first breakfast session that I attended was on Cloud Computing with Marissa Mayer from Google, Adam Selipsky from Amazon, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, and Zach Nelson from NetSuite. Cloud Computing is increasingly attractive from a cost perspective, but enterprise customers are still worried about security and reliability. Google does not allow encryption and Amazon does not guarantee recovery and recommends that you back up your data on S3. So I asked the panel when we can expect security AND reliability. Marissa didn't answer and the other panelists answered the part of the question that they wanted to.

Cloud Computing: Michael Copeland (Fortune), Charles Fitzgerald (Pi/EMC), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Adam Selipski (Amazon Web Services), Marissa Mayer (Google)

Mark Anderson hosted a session on the direction of technology with several CTO and technology leaders including Sophie Vanderbroek from Xerox, Padma Warrior of Cisco, and Bob Iannucci of Nokia. The discussion range as far as their technologies. Xerox is looking at collaboration and sees the future in intelligently understanding the content being handled in that collaboration in something called content-centric networking. This is something that Alfresco can get its head around. Cisco sees the internet morphing from a primarily messaging based platform to more of an entertainment platform. Video being a more natural form of communication will become more pervasive and that the real requirement will be more filtering rather than generating. Nokia took us on a cosmological tour of technology trying to show us that the bigger issues are around mobility and the data that affects our lives. In addition, data privacy will become one of the biggest issues to tackle.

CTO Forum: Mark Anderson (Strategic News Service), Sophie Vanderbroeken (Xerox), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Bob Iannucci (Nokia)

Vinton Cerf, inventor of the Internet and now at Google, kept sitting in front of me and always asking questions. It made it difficult to get a question in myself since the moderators would always move to another part of the audience. Get your own seat Vint!

Nicholas Negroponte showed off for the very first time a dual-boot One Laptop Per Child XO machine (the famous $100 laptop) that is now configured to run both the OLPC operating system and Microsoft Windows.

David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Negroponte showing of the latest dual boot OLPC XO

In "How Green is Your (Silicon) Valley?", VJ Joshi from HP, Rob Lloyd from Cisco,  Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, and Michael Spliter from Applied Materials discussed the role that Silicon Valley can play in creating green solutions. By and large, as you would expect, IT makes things more efficient and eliminates the need for travel and face to face meetings. VJ kept it relatively small with the practical steps that HP is taking like making two-sided printing the default. Jonathan kept it big getting us to think about what will happen when IT services as a utility will be 10 times bigger. Jonathan Schwartz talked about MySQL's approach of no office buildings at all. But, I found Rob's and Cisco's point more insightful. When we start architecting our buildings (and homes) with information systems and controls in place, that is when we will really start to reduce our greenhouse footprint. Meeting rooms, transportation and environmental control facilitated by IT (and of course internet routers) will allow us to reduce transportation of ourselves and our resources.

Greening the Valley: James Manyika (Fortune and hidden by the Fortune sign), VJ Joshi (HP), Rob Lloyd (Cisco), Michael Spliter (Applied Materials), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)

David Kirkpatrick is writing a book on Facebook called The Facebook Effect and used this position to interview new COO Sheryl Sandberg. She puts on a much more media savvy front than Mark Zuckerberg, but not quite as much out-of-the-garage appeal. It all sounded a little too glib. Apparently she used to work in the White House at some point and Google. I was surprised to learn that co-founder Matt Cohler had left Facebook, although he was attending the conference. She announced that he was becoming a partner at Benchmark Capital. I bet Peter Fenton had something to do with that. I had interacted with Matt in relation to some work that we were doing with the World Economic Forum and it seemed that at least part of his role at Facebook was now taken up by Sheryl.

David Kirkpatrick and new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

At this point, my camera ran out of battery :-( I participated in a Lunch Lab on Healthcare facilitated by Marissa Mayer of Google and Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation, but they did most of the talking. There were a few experts who got a word in edgewise, but I didn't really feel that I could participate despite having working with pharmaceutical companies on information management and classification for the last 15 years.

In World without Exits, Andrew Braccia (Accel), Danny Rimer (Index), Dana Settle (Greylock), David Siminoff (Venrock) and Quincy Smith (CBS Interactive) all talked about how there are no exits aside from acquisitions. Danny, one of the best investors in Europe and backer of MySQL and Skype, said that there are still acquirers for good companies. He said all of his portfolio that had been acquired since the beginning of the year had been enterprise software companies. Andrew said that he is telling his portfolio companies to hunker down for the next couple of years. I have heard such talk since 1994 before the big launch of Netscapes IPO.

Life on the Net 2018 was pretty interesting, although probably a little too diverse like several of the sessions at the conference. We had Larry Lessig - open source intellectual property specialist, Phil Rosedale - founder of Second Life and Half Moon Bay resident, Joichi Ito - chairman of SixApart. Larry's "the sky's falling and your privacy is gone" position was pretty scary. He said that the Patriot Act came in so fast that it must have been pre-written before 9/11. He said that he had sources that have told him that is exactly what happened and that there is an internet-based Patriot Act waiting to be put in place as a result of any sort of catastrophic disaster on the Net. Phil believes that virtual worlds of some sort will be the future of user interfaces to the internet because they are easier for older and non-experienced users to use. Obviously, we need more technology improvements for this to happen. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to be overcome is the notion of a single identity that is secure and non-repudiable.

The evening event started with a Tweet Out in the platform overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I now have more respect and interest in Twitter as a result of meeting so many Tweeters. Dinner was hosted by the government of Singapore and I met so many people that evening I can't recount it all. However, I didn't stay up so late that I didn't get a chance to get up early and take some pictures of the harbor I was staying next to. I waited too late to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, but sometimes that can be an advantage, especially cost wise.

   

An early morning stroll around the harbor at Half Moon Bay.

I was up early enough to sit in on a breakfast roundtable on Programming for the Web and Social Networking. Now I thought this meant programming like programming a computer. They meant programming like NBC is setting up it's Fall line-up. Still interesting. I am getting a sense that there is still a new big wave of video and much richer content coming than just YouTube. And the opportunity to manage it, organize it, categorize it and monetize it will be huge.

Finally, I sat in on a real programming session with the Future of Code, featuring David Hansson of BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails fame, Grady Booch - early pioneer of Object Oriented Programming and at IBM, and Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software, creator of Microsoft Office and Space Tourist. They all take very different approaches to architecture and they spent a lot of the time telling each other that the others were wrong. They all have points and my biggest insight from this is what prejudiced guys they all are.

Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks and moderator), David Hansson (37signals), Roger Simonyi (Intentional), Grady Booch (IBM)

Grady Booch: "There are systems built upon systems and then you have a lot of crap. But that's enough about the Bush Administration."

I missed the rest because I had to head off to Sun Computers, but you can read more below about Eric Schmidt and Neil Young. We had gone to meet with Jonathan Schwartz who had left the conference the day before. He said that although there were interesting things there, he does go to a lot of those things. I asked him if they were all the same. He nodded. Lucky guy. Living 5000 miles away from the valley, I don't get to go to that many events of this quality.


Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life.  Is He In Denial? - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

A glimpse into the future of the Internet - Tom Forenski, ZDNet Blogs

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: Making money isn't a priority (except for her) - Nicholas Carlson, Valleywag

Liveblogging Eric Schmidt/Google Interview at Brainstorm - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

The best Fortune Brainstorm Tech Talk: Neil Young challenges tech industry - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

The blog editing system in action - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

Introducing Alfresco Labs 3

I am pleased to announce the beta release of Alfresco Labs 3, our new version of Alfresco targeted at collaborative content management and the first open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. Alfresco Labs 3 is a natural evolution of the Alfresco platform that started with the first preview release of Alfresco three years ago. As Alfresco has grown more powerful in capabilities, we have strived to simplify both usage and development of Alfresco web clients, web sites and web applications. This release has leveraged the Web Script architecture that we introduced last year and provides simple user interface components allowing knowledge workers to collaborate on and share content. You can find out more here and download this latest version here.

New Alfresco Share application previewed in Alfresco Labs 3

We believe that the Enterprise Content Management market is evolving from specialized software for information intensive activities to become a major component of business and infrastructure for knowledge workers. Although over 90% of the Fortune 1000 have at least one type of ECM system, less than 10% of the employees in most of these companies use ECM, despite the huge increase in regulatory compliance and information explosion. Microsoft SharePoint, through its hooks to Microsoft Office, has made significant inroads into this yawning gap in the ECM market, and growing at 35% per annum as a result. We believe that open source has an even greater opportunity to reach into this portion of the market through its ubiquitous internet reach. With Alfresco Labs 3, our opportunity is to provide an alternative to, provide interoperability with, and be complementary to Microsoft SharePoint.

New Alfresco Surf RESTful platform uses Yahoo's YUI AJAX library for a more interactive experience. New thumbnail service provides previews before opening.

Much of the development of Alfresco Labs 3 has focused on building the Alfresco Surf platform, a robust, enterprise-class web application and site assembly framework that bundles a full site construction object model and toolkit for building class-leading web and collaborative applications. The Surf platform is designed to work in a number of different web environments, including as a Web Part in Microsoft SharePoint Portal. It includes content oriented components designed around the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) AJAX Library and Adobe Flex for dynamic uploads and previewing of content and other information. The new user interface components make it much simpler for users to develop new collaborative web applications.

New Activities, Tagging and People services provide a social collaboration experience for the enterprise. Collaborative sites also have wikis, blogs, calendars and discussion forums.

With Alfresco Labs 3, we have also introduced a few important concepts as New Content Services to support collaborative applications and social computing including Sites, Thumbnails, Tagging and Activities. The Surf platform uses the Sites to construct a collaborative site and store framework information on how pages and components are constructed. The Thumbnail service generates previews of documents and content to show what you will open before you open it, enhancing the more limited view of an icon that only tells you what time you have. The Tagging service provides a simple folksonomy view of content as well as providing tools for constructing tag clouds. Activities are similar to Feed inside of Facebook, providing a stream of information on what activities people are working or commenting on. To support these services, the People services have been enhanced with more information and the ability to connect people to one another for social networking. These services are accessible through REST-based APIs and from JavaScript allowing their use in construction of new Surf components.

Integration with Flex and YUI provides simultaneous loading of files.

Alfresco Share, which we are previewing with Alfresco Labs 3, is built on the Alfresco Surf platform and is designed to be modified by end users or through programming to fit a wide range of collaborative and social computing applications. Share provides a simple web site paradigm for creating collaborative applications by aggregating Surf components and incorporating new Surf components as they are developed. This is an early release of the Share application, but we encourage our open source community to develop new components based upon the examples of the basic components provided. With Share, users can create a collaborative site either inside or outside the organization, invite users and share and collaborate around content. Share includes document libraries, calendars, wikis, blogs, and discussions.

Microsoft Office can access content in Alfresco as though it were a Microsoft SharePoint Server

Also previewed in Labs 3 is Microsoft SharePoint compatibility from within Microsoft Office that makes Office applications think they are talking to a SharePoint server. Microsoft released the SharePoint protocols this spring as part of its compliance with the European Commissions’ decision issued on March 24, 2004 along with an increasing tendency by Microsoft toward interoperability. Alfresco is the first ECM system to implement the Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint Services protocols as a compatible server. This allows Office users to browse and find documents within the repository, checkout / checkin / version documents, share the documents in shared workspaces and access the additional menus and task panes reserved for SharePoint. All of this is available with no additional software needed to be added to Office.

The entire team is getting way too big to congratulate individually, but everyone has done a great job so far getting this beta to realization. For this, I am extremely grateful. We look forward to providing the next update in early September where the following will be provided:

• New REST APIs based upon ATOM Publishing
• New look and feel for Alfresco Share
• Additional collaboration components, including instant messaging
• A new properties framework for extended metadata
• New people and site search capabilities built around social networking
• Web views support for Microsoft Office SharePoint emulation
• Associated technical documentation

Our current plan is that the Enterprise version of Alfresco 3 will be available in mid-October.

We think that Alfresco 3 will provide our users and customers choice in developing collaborative application and in supporting basic content management and collaborative sharing for Microsoft Office users. Rather than a single fixed platform, Alfresco offers a choice of operating system, database, application server, development environment, and web browser, including those provided by Microsoft. In addition, through our work with Unisys, we have demonstrated a platform that is much more scalable. By providing this new platform as open source, we hope that you will also help us in making it a better platform and contribute new collaborative capabilities and components that we could not even have conceived.