Dear Alfresco,
I am trying to buy something from you. I downloaded the source code from your site, an I am pleased with what I see. In order to embed JLAN in my product, I need to know the price of your product. I want to embed your JLAN prodcut [1]. On the product site you write:
Alfresco offers either an end user and developer license that allows companies to use Alfresco JLAN for internal deployments, or an OEM license that allows you to add Alfresco JLAN features and functionality to your products. For more information please contact jlan@alfresco.com.
Ok, so I wrote an email to that address, asking for a quote. No response.
I also asked the same question at the German sales email contact as listed at [2], twice. Additionally, I called the German hotline number, twice, but only got an answering machine at normal business hours. Also no reaction from the US sales email, twice.
After these seven (!) attempts to just get a price quote from you, I feel lost.
But customer service can get even worse!
Now I get emails like these:
- Besuchen Sie Alfresco auf der CeBIT
- Doing More with your Alfresco Trial. 30-Day Full Enterprise Download Trial.
- Webinar: Alfresco-SAP-Anbindung in der Praxis, 18 März 2010 um 16:00
- Upcoming Webinars: Alfresco Share Customization and SAP Integration
Why do you spam your potential customers instead of selling your software?
[1] http://www.alfresco.com/products/aifs/
[2] http://www.alfresco.com/about/contact/
Regards,
Max Völkel
Update 1:
On 22.03.2010 at 10 am, I got an Email from Alfresco with various contact details. Whatever caused their hickup, the Web 2.0 seems to have worked better than their internal structure, this time. Maybe more and more future communication will turn in Web 2.0 social network communication?
Unfortunately, I cannot predict my future sales numbers and had to learn that OEM business works not as I expected it. I expected a simple price table for 1-10 licenses, 11-100, 101-1000 and another per-license-price for more than 1000. This is not the case. Alfresco wants to calculate my business case, determine how much of the value is contributed by their software and then come up with a quote. This makes sense for them to obtain a fair price for their software. On the other hand, for smaller players like me, this means I have no way to start using Alfresco software.
As all the code is open source anyway, all they would need to do is set up a contract valid for, let's say, up to 10.000 licenses and let me pay by credit card for the number of licenses used at the end of each quarter.
Right now I could secretly take the source code, use it, and get sued (rightly so!). In the future, I could pay for a number of licenses, and if I would not have paid enough, get sued in the same way. So there is almost no overhead for them to earn more money. They can just set up self-service web-shop for licenses and continue to sue people without proper licenses.
Does anybody knows of another CIFS/Samba server written in Java that can be embedded for a reasonable license fee even for a small or unknown number of licenses?
At the end of the week, Alfresco will tell me more details about licensing options with them, I'll keep you updated.
Update 2:
Today, 26.03.2010, we received our final verdict from Alfresco: We are too small to talk too. Of course, they did not use these words. But they are definitely not interested in negotiating a deal with unknown results, most likely because their negotiation process is too costly. Their product is really nice, they have a SMB/CIFS+WebDav-server in Java called JLAN and fits our current APIs really well. But since its either GPL (killing all our potential business models) or a minimum deal of ca. 10.000 Euros, we'll now need to go ahead an continue to implement our own WebDAV server. So SemFS will not have CIFS support in the near future, but we will open-source (BSD license) our WebDAV server. We looked at Slide (project is dead), JackRabbits WebDAV (really complicated OO-architecture with way too many interfaces), and other.
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