OStatic

Launched in 2005, Alfresco Software provides a leading open source enterprise content management (ECM) system, known for its modularity and scalability. The company was founded by John Newton, co-founder of document management company Documentum, and John Powell, who was the former COO of Business Objects. Alfresco has achieved remarkable growth as a commercial open source firm, has many partners, employs roughly 110 people, and is a member of the Open Source Channel Alliance. John Newton, CTO, Chairman and Co-Founder of Alfresco, was kind enough to take some questions from us on Alfresco's software, its strategy? as a commercial open source company, and the state and future of open source. Here are his thoughts, below the fold.

Ross Turk, directory of community at SourceForge, has a notable column up today at InfoWorld, where he considers whether the economic downturn really is good for open source. We've reported on the topic a number of times, and concluded that for the most part, the gloomy times are boosting open source adoption. Survey respondents recently overwhelmingly agreed with that, as seen here. Turk points out that in the difficult economic period seen in 2000 to 2002, open source adoption in enterprises took off, but he points out that this time things may be different. Is he right?

In conjunction with the recent series of posts we did on the future of open source, we also asked OStatic readers to participate in Northbridge Venture Partners' 2009 Future of Open Source survey. At this week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, the results of the survey were released, and you can watch an interesting slideshow on the results here. Over 435 people responded to the survey, including many open source developers. Here are some thoughts on the findings.