Mike Benner

Coldfusion To Be Open Source

Mar 11 by Michael Benner

Well, kind of and maybe not in a good way. The news broke yesterday about New Atlanta taking a version of BlueDragon open source. I read everyone's hopeful thoughts, digested slept on it and now will give my take. What? How? If I was Adobe

I would be pretty furious.

Now, like I said I read everyone's posts and comments and some of the reasons for it being good really didn't make sense or to me. The idea that this will lower the barrier to entry is crazy. The developer edition of CF is free, so to become a CF programmer cost as much as ASP or PHP. Want to host it? I pay $10 a month for a MSSQL/CF7 hosting account that is perfect for prototyping (heck this blog is on one of those accounts). So unless someone can explain to me how this makes barrier to entry lower (without saying "It's OpenSource and Free").

The other comment I read over and over again was that this would make Adobe do something. Do something? What do you want them to do? Make it Open Source and free themselves? Please! Would you? Really?!? Oh, I know it will make them develop better features and make more user requested fixes and adds quicker. Have you seen CF8? Since Adobe took over for Macromedia ColdFusion has had great progress and one of the BEST feature rich versions come out. Adobe is doing great work on CF and integrating key technologies into it.

What I fear most out of this, is a great confusion. Why does your CF cost more than his? Why does the code work here and not there? This could be bad for OUR clients. They will have to start concerning themselves with different flavors of CF and we will have to start explaining why the Adobe version costs more and what makes it better (I have no doubt it will be better). Let's not forget Adobe sets the "standards" for CF, and open source project will start to jeopardize that. I am all for competition to promote innovation, but that is what ASP.NET and PHP are for, don't compete with yourself.

I like Open Source Projects, I am working on a couple, but I don't like this. If this was announced by Adobe, then I would have a much different attitude. Hopefully, the buzz wears off and the project just fades and does not cause customer confusion. If Adobe, adopts and accepts this I will change my mind, but in the meantime, please lets not have this put a fork in the CF path. New Atlanta, my plea to you is, follow the "standards" set forth by Adobe, don't try to implement new features not available from Adobe's version of CF. Be a good steering committee and just make a great option that works as well or better than Adobe's version, but does not stray, and you will earn my support.

Now, please if I am misunderstanding something in regards to this topic let me know. I don't claim to be up on all the licensing, copyright info, etc. I wasn't even sure how BlueDragon, Ralio, etc existed to begin with.

Comments (5)              | 447 Views | Tags: General, Coldfusion, WTF?!?!?

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It's all about choice. YOU like the way Adobe is going with ColdFusion. I may not. I may want "feature X" but despite me stalking Ben Forta demanding they add this feature - they ignore me. With the open-source BlueDragon I am no free to add that feature.

In regards to customer confusion - I know back when I was dealing with customers - they rarely cared about what platform things were running on. And with BlueDragon being free, that again gives me as a developer more choices. I can now build that simple website and host it on BD and not loose my shirt because I had pay Adobe ColdFusion license fees. If the client wants more advanced features - I can offer Adobe ColdFusion - again - it's all about choice.

# Posted By Jim Priest | 3/12/08 12:23 PM

I guess I'm seeing this quite differently--this is really no different than what exists in the Java world. I can have JBoss for free, or I can pay IBM a lot of money for WebSphere. The difference lies in what features each product offers vs. what I want to pay for it.

# Posted By Matt Woodward | 3/12/08 12:24 PM

Don't forget that New Atlanta will continue selling a commercial version of BlueDragon J2EE (as well as selling the JX and .NET editions which are not being open sourced). In other words, in terms of product pricing, this won't change the commercial market at all (unless New Atlanta substantially lower the prices of their commercial products - which seems unlikely). The impact of *adding* a free, open source version to the mix is really unknown (so I agree with most of your points - except that I very much doubt Adobe are "furious" :)

# Posted By Sean Corfield | 3/12/08 3:09 PM

Jim, you can add a feature to *your* copy of BlueDragon J2EE but that doesn't mean the steering committee or New Atlanta will accept it for the core for everyone else. Successful open source projects are fairly tightly controlled in order to maintain quality and focus.

# Posted By Sean Corfield | 3/12/08 3:12 PM

@Jim,
I do agree with choice and think it is usually a good thing. My concern is more rooted in things like IE. HTML has standards, CSS has standards, and so does JS. But yet we all complain about IE not supporting them. And even then Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari all render different and require tricks to make them work. I don't want to go down that path with a Server Side Language as well. If that feature you add to OS CF isn't in Adobe CF and your client leaves to find another developer, they need to know that you are an OS CF developer (or at least know that their platform is not just CF but OS CF) and need to find a CF developer that deals in that flavor.

@Sean,

Your right, they probably aren't furious, but I would like to think that they should have some say in the direction of this. I do think if TIGHT control is maintained and keeping up with and in stride with Adobe and their standards can make it successful.

Here's to hoping Blue Atlanta does the right thing and if it picks up steam Adobe gets involved and helps keep it on the right track.

# Posted By Mike Benner | 3/13/08 12:57 AM

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