It take me some time to write about it as I wanted to read almost everything people wrote before. At the end of this article you'll find a lot of links to blogs and websites that I read before writing this.

First a note I took at the first sight of this news: it's very good for the CFML as a language and for the ColdFusion market overall. It can help developers to first learn CF, use it on their projects and renew the market around Adobe's (and New Atlanta's, see below) product.

Although I think it's good, I don't think the OS world will embrace CFML on the long run. They already have PHP and other options like Ruby so why? 'Cause CFML is so easy to program with? A lot of open source programmers I know thinks it is a problem, not an advantage.

But the situation may change a lot if - and only if - New Atlanta and Adobe put some effort on the OS option. Why Adobe, you may ask. Having an OS version to kick start with CFML is great for Adobe, specially if they don't have to OS ColdFusion (their own product) to achieve this.

They can sell a better and increased version, they can make the BDOS compatible with their own product, making sure that people who start with BDOS can "upgrade" to Adobe ColdFusion without a lot of work.

But, as people noted around the "blogosphere", the CFEclipse plugin didn't catch with the "ColdFusion OS community". Smith, another OS option to Adobe ColdFusion, didn't had a lot of developers jumping in and probably New Atlanta's BD will have not either. One can argue that it's about the lack of features - how can you expect people to contribute within something buggy and featureless? But that's not the excuse for CFEclipse, who is a great plugin. Adobe - and Macromedia, before - wasn't known for their efforts to help the community spread the word - even knowing that developers are always busy and active doing it for them.

The license adopted will be GPL - the same way MySQL does. If you want to distribute your software with BlueDragon, it'll have to be open source by GPL too. The .Net version will not be open sourced, only the J2EE - and for companies or individuals who doesn't can/want to share, there'll be another commercial license.

The announcement was made but the "real product" isn't there for people to mess with now - it'll be in June 2008. Now the links and comments on then:

New Atlanta's annoucement

www.dcooper.org
Damon Cooper makes a harsh comment on New Atlanta's announcement, claiming it is a "defeat" for Blue Dragon. As a lot of commenters on the topic, I don't plainly agree with him...

Interview with Vince Bonfanti
Mr. Bonfanti is president and co-founder of New Atlanta. In this excellent interview to Dan Wilson at ColdFusion Zone he speaks about the ways New Atlanta will be serving the OS version of Blue Dragon, the licensing and other interesting details. Worth the reading!

How to get involved with the Open Source version of BlueDragon

An Architect's View
Sean Corfield wisely makes a cautious comment on the announcement and I share his opinion: the future lies on the open source folk's acceptance of this new language.

ColdFusion Jedi
Raymond Camden's adds to the discussion but the real treasure is on the comments. Brian Swartzfager's and Gary F's comments about the hosting companies picking BD over Adobe ColdFusion (or allowing users to install it) could really change the face of CFML market over time. Great discussion!

Fusion Authority
Charlie Griefer takes another shot on the announcement and here I find someone who believes Adobe could weight in by open sourcing their Standard version of ColdFusion. I don't believe they'll go so far, but it would be an interesting move. Some CFML Standards Committee with Adobe and New Atlanta, and Railo and Smith joining on BDOS would be really amazing... and really change the CFML market around the globe.

Simon Whatley
This is a blogger that I learned to watch closely as he is a great article writer, but on this he only posted a quick note and pointed to...

Aarrgghh!!
By Terrence Ryan. After an opinion that I agree on - that the community will not see any "gains" with this, specially "right now", he aims at the "sides" opinion, believing that there would be two market views - the "free" vs "paid" solutions, betting Adobe will win with the paid one. I don't know if he is wrong, but I believe on the kick start with the OS/free solution then upgrading to a paid solution. It happens a lot with PHP? No. But it happens with MySQL and New Atlanta is acting like it so they can be successful. Let's see.

CFGigolô (in Portuguese)
The announce even make it on Brazilian blogging community, with Alex Hubner posting a single note telling how he thinks this is an important move for CFML community, specially here in Brazil where - it's true - it's not common to pay for a web language solution.

And that's it. Obviously we'll have to watch it over time to see what really happens, but the announce really caused a lot of fuss inside the community - don't know if outside too - and it has potential to change things. I'll be using BDOS when it becomes available and posting notes here.

Labels: adobe, bluedragon, cfml, coldfusion, hosting, opensource

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