…about my opinion on the open-sourcing of Blue Dragon that has been announced a few weeks ago. To be honest: I do like it and I truely and honestly hope that they will manage to form a community around the open-source version of their product.
Lots of people discussed the topic and it’s meaningfulness for Adobe, ColdFusion, Blue Dragon, the web, the community and the whole world. Some of them were good and some others were just plainly bullocks and unprofessional. I don’t want to repeat all the pros and cons and backs and forths in detail here, but let me state my opinion very clearly – a truely open-source version of a CFML runtime engine which is driven by a strong community could provide benefits for everyone in the market.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for all the cool extras CF 7 and CF 8 provide, i.e. PDF integration, Ajax components, .NET bridge etc. – if someone could just build a very plain, open-source CFML engine supporting the core language – it would be great. Someone from Adobe once told me that surveys showed that 90something percent of the CF developers use about 10 tags – getting the idea here?
There are a few alternatives available right now: Railo, Smith Project etc and all cover their particular niche markets. Still – they’re not open-source and not community-driven and in case of the Smith Project you’d find it’s just not up to scratch with the expected level for using it in production. So – open source BlueDragon is a chance to make it right – a chance for New Atlanta but also a chance for the CF developer community and in particular a chance for Adobe.
BTW: The most balanced and reasonable blog post about the whole story has been written by Geoff Bowers. If you haven’t seen it yet – have a read. I can’t agree more with him saying that Adobe should actually support New Atlanta in open-sourcing BlueDragon and even further contribute to the project.
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