Alfresco Decides Less is More: Switching to LGPL

by Joe Brockmeier - Feb. 01, 2010Comments (2)

Alfresco is switching licenses, again. This time the company is switching the license for its enterprise content management system to the GNU LGPL, away from the GNU GPL.

Alfresco's switch is possible because the company requires a contributor agreement to accept code into its repository. The agreement requires that contributors give Alfresco the ability to re-license the code in any way it sees fit. Good thing, too, because the company has changed its license twice in the past five years. Previously Alfresco used a custom license based on the Mozilla MPL, before it switched away from that to the GNU GPL.

The advantage afforded by the LGPL, at least from Alfresco's perspective, is that it's more commercially friendly while still requiring changes to the core code to be contributed back. It can be combined with proprietary software, but if the code from Alfresco is changed and distributed, those changes must also be licensed under the LGPL.

It's proving a popular license with similar projects. Nuxeo also uses the LGPL, and both companies are taking a cue from JBoss. JBoss laid out its reasoning in 2005 as to why it uses the LGPL (PDF link).

The company is looking to make Alfresco not just a popular application, but a platform for other companies to build on, and that means licensing as liberally as possible if they want to attract proprietary development. It's not a licensing model that will make free software purists happy, but it does ensure that the core platform is available to all and gives the company a better chance of monetizing the platform.

The actual switch won't take place until the release of Alfresco 3.3 Community in March of this year. But the company says "if you wish to consider alfresco.war today as LGPL, you may do so." (The .war file is a "Web Application Archive," used to distribute JavaServer files.)

Finally, don't get too comfortable with the LGPL. Alfresco's John Newton says that the company might switch to a Apache or BSD license in the future, but the move is currently not possible because core components of Alfresco (Hibernate and JBPM) are LGPL.