<p>John Newton has had an influential career in the content management market, having co-founded and led the development of Documentum, subsequently acquired by EMC. Today Newton is chairman and CTO at open source content management firm, Alfresco. I grabbed him on the phone for a Q&A.</p><p>What's the motivation for the open source model and what do you believe is the benefit for customers?</p><p>I think the first word in open source is probably the key to the whole thing. Being open. Open source usually means open standards. Basically the freedom to be able to take and make the system do what you need it to do; to be able to move information in and out of the system, to not be locked in and to be able to be aware of what's going on with the product in-depth.</p><p>I've done both models of closed source and open source and it's very liberating to be open source - you're not trying to hide your intellectual property and that freedom allows you to innovate a lot faster and with the participation of the community and all the users of the system. And perhaps the biggest thing is people can access the system without necessarily paying for it, try it out, so it becomes much smoother, faster on-boarding.</p><p><a href="http://www.cbronline.com/blogs/technology/qa-the-changing-blend-of-enterprise-content-06122012">Keep reading...</a></p>
