OpenText announced this week that it would begin offering support for Alfresco Content Services. The announcement comes about a month after Hyland Software announced their intention to acquire Alfresco Software, Inc. (see my blog post).

UPDATE: After the original publication of this post, OpenText got back to me with answers to my questions. I’ve updated the post to reflect that, and I’ve posted the Q&A verbatim, here.

Alfresco sells services and support for their software, Alfresco Content Services (ACS), which includes a handful of features available only to those who purchase a license. In addition, Alfresco Software distributes a “community” edition of ACS freely-available to everyone under the Apache License.

Both Enterprise & Community Edition

Based on the announcement, OpenText will provide paid support to both enterprise and community edition customers. But if someone is already paying for support for enterprise edition from Alfresco Software, why would they pay an additional maintenance fee to OpenText, a competitor, for support of that same software? It’s hard to imagine how a customer would be able to justify that.

Providing support for community edition makes more sense. Alfresco does not offer any kind of support for community edition beyond what customers can get by reading forums and blog posts, and Alfresco actually forbids its partners from selling support and services around community edition. OpenText will try to fill that gap.

There is already a large community of non-partner service providers who have built businesses providing professional services to both enterprise edition and community edition customers (Disclosure: I am one). The challenge for OpenText is that they have yet to establish any credibility regarding their ability to provide support for Alfresco. They are trying to convince customers that they can basically walk into the room cold and throw enough resources at any problem to resolve it successfully.

The press release hints at how they will do this, saying, “OpenText has put in place a dedicated team to manage and contribute to the Alfresco open source community”. How big that team is, who it is comprised of, and what exactly they’ll be doing is not discussed in the announcement. So I reached out to James McGourlay, OpenText Executive Vice President, Operations, and that Q&A can be found here. The short answer is that the goal of the team is to provide level 2 support by leveraging OpenText’s experience in other ECM platforms to address Alfresco issues.

How will they collaborate with the community?

OpenText’s announcement may sound like they want to participate in the community, but when one of the community’s leaders asks to hear more about their plans, they aren’t forthcoming. So, we can only judge them by their actions. An Alfresco employee with visibility into the company’s issue tracking system confirmed earlier this week that OpenText has never filed a single issue, which is the generally accepted mechanism one would use to contribute fixes to any open source code base. I’ve never seen them at an Alfresco conference, in a chat room, or in the forums. That does not sound like a company that is ready to engage the community.

I reached out to OpenText to ask them how their community contributions are going to work. You can read the full Q&A here. OpenText says they have not yet filed any issues because they have only just launched the service. They plan to contribute fixes back to Alfresco via the Community Contributor Program.

Their own Alfresco distribution will not be public

If OpenText plans on “contributing to the Alfresco open source community” exactly how they plan to do that is important for the community to understand. OpenText says they are offering their customers a branded release of community edition. Branding is easy enough to add, but is it a fork? If you read the fact sheet that OpenText provides, it sheds a little more light:

“All open source fixes are submitted to the community for consideration in the next release. OpenText will maintain the fixes it submits until they are confirmed in an Alfresco Community Edition release.” –OpenText

This sure sounds like OpenText will maintain their own fork of Alfresco and that they will contribute changes to Alfresco for inclusion, upstream. It will then be up to Alfresco Software, Inc., for whom 100% of the ACS committers work, to decide whether or not to merge those fixes.

The key question for the Alfresco community is whether the OpenText fork will be a private fork or a public fork that they will run as a true open source project? If it is a private fork, then this isn’t really about open source or the community at all–this is instead about OpenText taking a marketing jab at Hyland and Alfresco. If it is going to be a public fork, well that would be huge news. Alfresco has always kept its community at arms-length when it comes to commitorship. But I highly doubt that OpenText, a proprietary behemoth who has existed on a steady diet of other proprietary ECM vendors (Documentum, Interwoven, Hummingbird, RedDot, Vignette…), is looking to start and invest in an open, collaborative ecosystem based on one of their competitor’s products.

After publication of this post, OpenText confirmed that they will maintain a private fork of Alfresco, distributed to their paying customers, so there will be no opportunity for the community at large to collaborate. However, the community might ultimately benefit from the contributions OpenText makes.

So is this all just snake oil?

At Alfresco DevCon, an online conference that took place online in August, John Newton, Alfresco’s founder and CTO, made an off-hand comment about going after OpenText and how great it would be to take them down, especially after they “captured” Documentum, a company he also founded. I could be wrong, but this announcement from OpenText just smacks of marketing chicanery aimed at throwing FUD into the market surrounding the Hyland acquisition, and basically telling John, “If you want some, come get some”.

_{^{Photo Credit: Snake Oil, by Eddie McHugh}}