Canonical scoops Alfresco man for operations

Open-source evangelist and überblogger Matt Asay has been named as chief operating officer of Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor. Asay will align strategic goals and operational activities, optimize day-to-day operations, and lead Canonical's marketing and back-office functions, Canonical said Friday. He joins Canonical …

[Falafel]

Groklaw's PJ has some thoughts...

[PJ: On a personal note, while I like Matt personally, he wrote to me not long ago that he couldn't see why people were so negative about Microsoft, so this is the end for Ubuntu being truly FOSS, as far as I'm concerned, and the beginning of it becoming fused mystery meat, if I may put it that way. They can be whatever they want, of course, but I think it would be foolish to expect anything now but a loss of the F in FOSS at Canonical now.]

[Stu J]

Alfresco

Is the crappest piece of software I've ever come across, with the shittiest support I've ever come across - a five figure fee for annual support, and they take a week to e-mail you back - pathetic.

Let's hope that Ubuntu doesn't end up going the same way......

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu...

will become a slow assortment of dozens of free Java libraries.....

[Reverend Brown]

Semi-coherent

I only know his name from his recordings with Ashlee Vance here on El Reg. I enjoyed those. Good luck to him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Alfresco....

"Is the crappest piece of software I've ever come across, with the shittiest support I've ever come across - a five figure fee for annual support, and they take a week to e-mail you back"

Don't forget that it wil take five minutes just to start up an Alfresco server. Then it will consume about 500 Mbyte of RAM just for doing nothing.

If you have to code custom logic that integrates with Alfresco, you have a code-compile-debug cycle of at least five minutes. The only way to cut this time down is to use incremental compilation of Eclipse (which does not work a lot of times) or to use remote procedure calls. IIRC you can use buggy RMI interfaces for that. Another option is to go with the Web Services Bloat. Probably as bug-ridden as the RMI interface.

Document full-text search is of course weird and does in no way resemble something like Google.

The database schema is the most inefficient and stupid concept I have ever seen. If it must be speedy, people have to use SQL directly instead of the ORM. Also, create your own table as you are used to do it with CREATE TABLE and sidestep the generic Alfresco bloat.

GUI is based on JSF, which means that every single click triggers a full-page update and that is so sllloowww. Ajax would be way too advanced for the AlfRetards.

If you want to be a partner of Alfresco you are not allowed to support your customers using the open-source version.

The list of deficiencies is topped off by shoddy documentation and alfresco.com being offline 30% of time.

Those who don't want to waste their time and nerves should go with EMC, Microsoft or IBM. Let the freetards play with AlFumble.

[Anonymous Coward]

Alfresco CIFS

..certainly is buggy, too. Nicely fits with the rest of the bugware.

[CIFS allows for windows PCs or other SMB-like clients to mount an Alfresco document repository]

[candtalan]

Brought to you by the letter 'F'

I certainly wish Matt all the best. I have followed his blogs from time to time and have noted his promotion of open source. But I have not noticed a love of the Libre aspect, F for freedom, the ethical and political stance which provides the motivational powerhouse of energy sustaining the FOSS movement.

'Open source' is a useful stepping stone concept but it is not what it is all about. I trust that Canonical will continue to appreciate the letter 'F'.