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

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Posted by Joe Walker on 23 February 2007 15:56:37 GMT #