My colleague Stephen Walli and Matt Asay from Alfresco had an excellent dialog on Stephe’s blog about what it means to be an open source company and how an open source software company should view its users.
To give you a little background on the topic, Matt wrote several posts essentially saying that you get what you pay for and, if you want good software, you need to pay for it otherwise you are essentially cheating the system. We feel that people can contribute back to an open source project in many ways including simply using it and by doing so, testing it, and contributing ideas.
Stephe, Dave Gynn, Matt and I are friends going back prior to Matt’s joining Alfresco. These conversations are extremely constructive and I think that it is great that they are happening out in the open. In the commercial software world, you wouldn’t see partners debating in public. But that is the beauty of open source. Everything happens out in the open.
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