The Future of ColdFusion: What about Blue Dragon?
Adam asked:
Do you have something against OpenBD that you don't mention it at all? I understand if you do but it concerns me that it is not even mentioned. Its a valid project that has introduced some fairly innovative concepts over the years, cfimage, multithread, CFML on JAVA. Leaving it out of the picture would be a disservice to the CFML community in general.
My response:
Hi Adam,
I think that is a fair point. There is no question that both BlueDragon (the comercial Java and .NET offerings) and the newer OpenBD through TagServlet are a part of the ColdFusion story. However, it's not a part that I'm qualified to write. As I've been moving from Windows to Linux, the .NET story never interested me, I personally never found a compelling reason to use BlueDragon as a commercial offering and after briefly reviewing the announcement, I didn't see anything relevant to me in the open source offering. There is no question that the reporting of certain injudicious comments by both Vince (BD) and Alan (Tagservlet) didn't help to engender a positive feeling about either organization.
That said, without the JBoss/Red Hat announcement, I probably wouldn't have included Railo within this series either. I really like Gert and have a lot of respect both from a business and a technical perspective for what his team have done, but if they were just to be another commercial competitor to Adobe or an open source project that would mainly cannibalize the existing customer base, I wouldn't have seen it as relevant or interesting enough to write about (which is not to say that others shouldn't find it relevant or interesting to write about on their blogs!).
Right now my main hope is that Railo and Adobe find a good way of working together that is in both their individual interests and the interests of the broader community. With the history and the current licensing terms, my concern is that OpenBD may end up hindering co-operation as I can see Adobe working together with a true open source project (once Railo manage to stop selling enterprise) that has a credible mechanism for trying to substantially grow the market. My concern is that there would be less of a business incentive for Adobe to work together with the OpenBD team to share (for instance) advance information about future tags to make the core language offering as complete as possible.
I will definitely look out some of the OpenBD team at CF United. If OpenBD has a compelling approach to marketing ColdFusion aggressively and actively outside of the existing community, if it is willing to provide a LGPL license and to stop any licensing relationship with New Atlanta, I'd be very interested in learning more about how Adobe, Railo and OpenBD could work to build the community substantially beyond the size that Adobe and Railo on their own could do.
Of course, I'm not saying that the OpenBD team should do this - only that it currently seems to me that if Alan is going to keep taking potshots at the CF community and OpenBD is only going to focus on cannibalizing the sales which justify Adobes continued investment in the community, it seems to me that the ColdFusion community would be better served if the OpenBD project didn't exist.
Of course, as I mentioned at the top of this posting, I may simply be posting from ignorance. I understand the value people saw in OpenBD before the Railo announcement. I'm just not clear at the moment that on balance the community is better off with two open source offerings rather than rallying behind one which has a real chance to grow the overall market and which has a better chance of a good relationship with Adobe - given both the history and the current conditions. I'm glad to see OpenDB as a hedge while Adobe and Railo figure out how they are going to interact, and I'm open to learning more about the net benefits to the ColdFusion community of OpenBD, but at the moment I'm not convinced that OpenDB is on balance in the best interests of the CF community.
That said, I'd love to link to a posting on your blog clarifying some of the ongoing benefits you see in the OpenBD project. I appreciate all of the hard work you and the rest of the OpenBD team are putting into a community project and whatever happens I want to see an outcome that is in the best interest of the overall CF community and that recognizes the effort contributed by all of the OpenBD team.
As a starting point, I'd thoroughly recommend everyone reading a posting from last week in which Adam provided some good insight into his thinking on OpenBD.
You seem to be missing the entire point of open-source software!
Who cares about Adobe's sales if you have an open-source version and a community "investing" its time to develop that?
And what exactly is wrong with existing customers, people who use Adobe now (and paying dearly for it), moving to an open-source version? It's a great contribution by OpenBD and Railo to lower the cost of using CFML, not something to be seen as negative in any way whatsoever. If Adobe wants to keep them as customers, give them a better deal.
We don't serve Adobe, they serve us.
@Ziggy While I enjoy the enthusiasm I think this speaks to Peter's concern/point, if all OpenBD does is eat away at Adobe's bottom line, is that really a service to the community? In short I would have to say no, OpenBD needs to reach out and grow the CFML community. JBoss backing Railo gives folks a clear view that they are reaching out, OpenBD not so much, yet... I
Thanks very much for the comment! Will do my best to attend the BoF (some possible scheduling issues), but if for any reason I don't make it, I'll buy you a drink before we leave DC and ask for the summary version as I'd certainly like to clear up any misconceptions of which I'm sure there are a few above! Also, ping me when you get the first blog post together so I can link to it to complete the series!
See ya later!
Man, you guys have all drank the kool-aid far too long. The goal of open-source CFML is NOT to support/protect Adobe. Does RoR now require a paid version to support and protect?
>>if all OpenBD does is eat away at Adobe's bottom line, is that really a service to the community?
Of course it is a tremendous service! I can't believe someone on the OpenBD committee could think otherwise. They (you) just lowered the software cost of doing CFML business to zero! Thank you very much for solving a huge complaint about CFML. Don't ask current CFML people not to use it now, or worry in any way that that is a bad result. It's great result.
Why care about Adobe's profits? They are in this to make a buck, absolutely nothing more. If they are forced to sell for less, or make less, they will. If they are forced out entirely (very unlikely) because of an active open-source version and community, who cares? Everyone has gained except Adobe shareholders. (And even if they were forced out, they'd probably open-source it too.)
Of course it is good if anyone expands the base, but that's a separate issue. (And another plus for the open-source version, because Adobe certainly hasn't been doing it due to cost.) And of course it will be useful to coordinate, but also a separate issue and Adobe is going to do anyone any favors.
Again: the goal of open-source CFML is NOT to support/protect Adobe. The goal is zero cost, broader reach, and hopefully a better more actively updated product. I'm now worried the people involved in these projects don't even see that. We've been under Communism too long ;-)
"And of course it will be useful to coordinate, but also a separate issue and Adobe ISN'T going to do anyone any favors."
Since the release of the code of OpenBD there has only been about a couple of CVS accesses to the code itself. Less then to speak about contribution. Do not under estimate what it means to build a CFML engine.
What I wanted to add is that the download rate for OpenBD is huge but the CVS access less then the numbers of fingers on your hand.
Open Source projects are mainly driven by a couple of individuals who are passionate in what they do. We are not surprised about this and did not expect otherwise.
I said, who cares about their profits. If lower, who cares? Even if they went out of business because of an active open-source replacement, really, who cares? You'd have a replacement. Are RoR/PHP/etc floundering because no expensive paid version?
If you really think more Adobe profits are better for you, ask to pay double for cf9. And if you are part of an open-source project and think that, well, what were you thinking when you open-sourced it??? Of course if it is any good it will cut into their profits substantially.
I fully expect Adobe to continue to be active and the growth of an OSS alternative to drive them to continue to innovate even faster than they already do. Coupled with growth opportunities outside of the core CFML audience I think this is an exciting time for ColdFusion filled with great opportunities. But it is important to understand that it may be in the communities interest for Adobe to continue to be involved in ColdFusion rather than just assuming that because there is an open source code base that'll immediately make Adobe irrelevant or that their potential concerns are irrelevant to the rest of the community.
@Nitai, Sure their are few CVS checkouts. It has been only a month since the OSS release.