There is a really interesting thread over at Alfresco’s licensing forum that points to one of the central problems with dual licensing as an open source business strategy: it is potentially confusing, even for the employees of the company in question.

The thread deals with the questions of Jerico, a potential Alfresco partner over the licensing restrictions placed on Alfresco Enterprise Edition versus Alfresco Labs. His questions are summarized as follows:

Am I right in saying that…
1) Alfresco partners are forced to revoke rights that have been previously granted to them in the Community Edition GPL.
2) Only the Community Edition is OSI compliant - not the Enterprise Edition.
3) Your employees have been directed to use the term “open source” rather than “shared source” or “proprietary source” when referring to the Alfresco Enterprise Edition although you are aware that only the Community Edition is OSI compliant.

Matt Asay, who as he points out is both emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative and inside counsel in the US for Alfresco, responds. In summary:

1. No, this is 100% wrong. Sorry.
2. Yes, you are correct.
3. No, this is 100% wrong. Employees are not directed to say anything, misinformation or otherwise. They say it because 100% of our code is made available under the GPL, including all of the code available under Enterprise. We simply dual license at the point of sale at the request of our customers.

Which should be the end of it, but isn’t. What follows is a discussion of two things (mainly):

1. Should Alfresco Enterprise Edition be referred to as “open source” if its license is not OSI-compliant?
2. Why do other Alfresco employees say that the Enterprise Edition is GPL when it isn’t?

Matt eloquently describes why Alfresco believes it is right to call its company and its products open source as the Open Source Definition deals with the development and licensing of the underlying code.

I do however, have some sympathy with Jerico in that it is not clear from Alfresco’s comparison page that the Enterprise Edition software is not available with an OSI-approved license.

Matt asks why Alfresco should do that, maintaining that he hadn’t found anyone other than Jerico who thought they should. However, an answer as to why it would be beneficial is found in the discussion of why one of Matt’s colleagues misspoke on the license used for Enterprise Edition.

If one of Alfresco’s own product evangelists can get confused by the licensing situation, then you cannot blame potential users/customers for also getting confused.

Maybe Matt is right and almost no one would care if Alfresco was more upfront about the distinction between “open source software” and “commercially-licensed open source-developed software” but in that case there is little harm in being more up front about it.

Matt and Jerico appear to agree, incidentally, that the situation would be clearer if Alfresco added proprietary extensions to a stable Alfresco Labs and followed the Open-Core Licensing model, and Matt has discussed on his Cnet blog how he thinks it makes it easier to differentiate between the two versions.

Alfresco isn’t going down that route and I am not advocating that they should, but I think this forum discussion (however isolated) does highlight the importance of clarity in differentiating between product editions.

By the way, I don’t want anyone to think that I am taking issue with Alfresco’s strategy. I think that this forum thread is a good example of the sort of discussions taking place at open source vendors the world over. This one just happened to take place in public.