> Because Alfresco doesn’t fix the bugs in the Community Edition and Alfresco partners will not help you implement and maintain it, the Community Edition is too risky to use for most companies to consider.

We do fix bugs in Community edition, more precisely, we merge in the bug fixes from the Enterprise Version. We don’t provide an SLA on that, but we do that often. According to our pingbacks, we have tens of thousands of live systems running community, so thre is definitely value that is being delivered through the Community Version.

To clarify the distinction. The Alfresco Community edition is where all the new features go in. Around release time, we pick a few of these to roll into enterprise, and stabilize them, putting through a rigorous QA process and making it enterprise-ready.

As far as partners only working with Enterprise version, since we have stabilized it, we have higher confidence in that code base, and thus sell support services around that. If our partners were to provide services on community, we would have a management nightmare where we would have two release trunks simultaneously. It would also be harder to service paying customers, on which, after all, is how we make our money. Just like you would not want to put into production beta software, we don’t recommend putting community into production for large enterprise-level systems (although like I said above, many people do).

The Community is supported through forums, where engineers and other technical employees, myself included, contribute regularly.

I definitely think that opening up for more contributions is great.

Jean