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One Month on ...
Open BD has just celebrated its first month out in the wild and we are staggered at its initial success. We've been planning this for well over a year now, as contrary to what anyone says, open sourcing a major project such as BlueDragon takes a lot of careful planning and preparation.
Distribution
We have learnt a lot in the short space of time that we've gone open source. The biggest lesson has been figuring out what the real CFML community wants and so far the answer seems to be ease of installation. Our most popular download has been the VMWare image that is ready to run, with the Jetty prepackaged coming in a distant second. We are still listening and will be providing a whole host of new options for you in the next coming month with a major announcement coming very soon regarding how you can get OpenBD even quicker!
Support
We have been asked regarding support for OpenBD. As an open source product, there is nothing stopping any professional service company from offering support. We already have a couple of companies preparing their message to offer this. In addition, New Atlanta will be supporting OpenBD through their BlueDragon.J2EE offering. This is very similar to how Fedora and Redhat operates. If you find you need a professional supported version, then you move to Redhat Enterprise. BlueDragon.J2EE will most likely be a few versions behind OpenBD, but that's only proper as New Atlanta (or any support company) must have the time to thoroughly test and document all new features.
Open source affords us the luxury of turning out updates fast and thick without worrying too much about support. We want to keep bug fixes coming out as fast as possible and once the Steering Committee has finalised the version numbering, we will be formalising our release cycle.
Relationships
We've also been asked what our relationship to New Atlanta is and who is TagServlet Ltd that appears in all the copyright messages. New Atlanta, as you know, are the company that commercialised and took the original BlueDragon project from its humble roots and made it into a fully fledged enterprise offering that eventually went on to power some of the largest websites in the world including MySpace. New Atlanta also quickly filled in a gap in the market by providing the only true Microsoft.NET runtime engine for CFML applications. BlueDragon.NET is officially recognized as a Microsoft certified program, with CFML now an official .NET language.
Legally speaking, the BlueDragon source code and rights has always been owned by the UK company TagServlet Ltd. Alan Williamson is the primary share holder of TagServlet Ltd. Alan is not an employee, shareholder or even board member of New Atlanta, with neither New Atlanta having any shareholding or representation with TagServlet Ltd.
New Atlanta, in legal speak, granted TagServlet Ltd the right to open source and persue the Java side of the BlueDragon engine. TagServlet Ltd then formed the Steering Committee with members from the community to help steer the direction of the engine. New Atlanta are not even involved in this steering committee, which is a bold step for them.
Alan naturally will ensure that communication between OpenBD and New Atlanta is kept open. New Atlanta are still contributing a lot of development to OpenBD (in terms of bug fixes and new features) and will look to receive, where applicable, updates back the way to keep their commerical products uptodate with the latest developments.
We the steering committee are in full control over the future of OpenBD, and we are always listening to what people are wanting.
Steering Committee Membership
We've had some movement on the steering committee with some people dropping off and others joining. This is all good and illustrates just how much commitment is required for any open source project to be successful. The Steering Committee mailing list is very active and some felt they just weren't contributing enough, so they kindly gave up their seat so others could help drive OpenBD forward.
We have some great additions including a very prominent member from the Java space that will be helping us take OpenBD and CFML into a whole new audience that historically had written CFML off.
But you don't have to be a member of the steering committee to get involved. Join our mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/openbd) and get involved. We welcome everyone and deny no one. Remember "there is no such thing as a silly question".
CFML Community
It has been quite the month for CFML with not only the release of OpenBD but also Railo announcing their open source plans too. It's wonderful how two independent companies can reach the same conclusions around the same time. Railo have obviously been planning this as long as we have and we are excited now to have even more options in the CFML runtime space. We've gone from drought to flood in a matter of weeks.
Some claimed CFML was dying, but we disagree. It is just getting started. We are reaching out to new people and this renewed innovation and interest in CFML as a language will benefit us all. We need to hunker down and figger out how to service this new influx of people together.
Let us hope this time next year, there will be even more choice in the CFML engine space. Open source has a tendency to provide choice, and choice is a wonderful thing to have in life. We would love to see the CFML runtime space as diverse and as rich as the J2EE application server space.
CFML Promotion
While we've got a website up and running, it is merely a holding site for the time being. We are preparing the integration of a full blown CFML CMS sytem that will naturally be powered by OpenBD. This will let all our Steering Committee the opportunity to edit and publish to their hearts content.
We also have our official blog (http://blog.openbluedragon.org/) that we are using to publish tips and help on both CFML and OpenBD. With a new legion of CFML developers coming to us, we need to prepare ourselves to help educate and steer them.
We also have a whole marketing campaign arranged which will see us going out evanglising both CFML and OpenBD. Look out for us in both print and in the conference circuit, both within and outside of the CFML community. We are also reaching out into communities outside of CFML to see if we can tempt them over to our CFML world.
All in all it has been a wonderful month for being a CFML developer.
Be sure to keep an eye on this blog for all future updates and announcements.
Comments (7)
Thank you for clarifying the relationship and explaining the organization of OpenBD, it was indeed helpful. I look forward to seeing your promotion of CFML outside the CFML community, it's much needed.
@Rob As the owner of and contributor to multiple open source projects himself, I'm pretty sure Joe understands the licensing, and is not one to troll. Why don't you enlighten us as to why you think his statement is incorrect?@Joe In regards to the CFML community. The way I see this is I do not feel comfortable only listening to just the upper echelon, and I mean this with no disrespect.
My best example of this is the AJAX functionality in ColdFusion. If I only listened to the generally vocal crowd I might come to the conclusion that this feature is not a priority, however looking deeper into the community I find more and more folks that really appreciate the functionality and would place the priority very high. Its not meant to be exclusionary rather very much more inclusive with no weight to those more vocal than others. Does that seem fair? I hope that clears up, at least my perspective, on what is meant by "Real CFML community.""...While Railo = LGPL, OpenBD = more restrictive GPL...."
That's simply not true. I'll assume by making that statement you have *not* read and/or understood each license, and are simply trolling.@ Regarding support With the current model of the OpenBD project, any company is free to offer support for OpenBD. There is no limitation and there is no negotiation that has to be resolved first to become a "partner". In this regard it quite opens who you want to trust and is worth of your money.
The conclusion reached by both companies is that an open source solution for CFML is required.
With respect to the different license types that are being offered, that is somewhat immaterial. It all depends on your definition on how "open" open source should be and that is something the software world at large has yet to resolve. We looked around at all the different models and how various brands conducted themselves with respect to license types. But we should celebrate the choice the CFML developer now has. We wouldn't presume to advise in general terms which engine is better suited for a given persons needs. We would urge you to read all the output from the OpenBD Steering Committe, as we have been very clear about our goal and where we want to see CFML as a language goal. We are here to increase the penetration of CFML and help pour more water into the sea as the old saying goes, "a rising tide lifts all boats.". We have also been working on a charter, that is common to the vast majority of open source projects. We will be publishing this very soon. That will serve as our rule book if you will. Thank you for your comments> figuring out what the real CFML community wants
Who is the "real CFML community"? I was confused by this statement. > Alan is not an employee, shareholder or even board > member of New Atlanta, with neither New Atlanta having > any shareholding or representation with TagServlet Ltd. Glad to see that clarified! A lot of us haven't known the details of the relationship until now. > two independent companies can reach the same conclusions > around the same time I've got the impression that besides having an open-source offering, the two companies haven't reached much in terms of the "same conclusions." While Railo = LGPL, OpenBD = more restrictive GPL. Further, Railo is an open source offering published and controlled by a company openly providing consulting services based on the offering, while OpenBD seems a little more nebulous, distancing itself from New Atlanta and being run by a committee - personally, I'd sooner trust people openly it it for their own gain (Railo) than a committee-led project without a unifying goal. Since you opened the Railo door, can you maybe provide the reasons why OpenDB is going the route it is in regards to these differences and any others that you see?
@Rachel
Oh, I'm sure Joe is an open source genius, but the onus on proving such flamebait as his does not lie on me for calling him out, but rather on him, for making such nonsense statements. The GPL is *not* "less free" than any other license, in fact, it is predicated on--and in fact establishes--the principles of software freedom as defined by the FSF. It's only "less free" if you believe that taking someone else's work (provided in a spirit of goodwill and collaboration) and appropriating it as your own is acceptable, which I'm guessing is Joe's approach.