>have enough time (or project management experience) to dedicate to
>managing a project. Almost all of the successful open source projects
>have some kind of corporate sponsorship,
This only tends to be required for the larger, actively developed, code bases. Coordinating a lot of contributors and ensuring the quality of the contributions is time consuming. Smaller, more task specific projects never normally require these overheads.
>even if the original source
>was developed for a specific business reason, then open sourced, or a
>corporation wants to take advantage of the free labor. FarCry,
>Mozilla, Linux, OpenOffice, MySQL, etc., all have corporations backing
>them in one way or another to help manage the direction of the
>project. Who in the CF world has the motivation to invest the
>resources necessary?
Well clearly our company does. Daemon manages all the resources behind FarCry CMS (http://farcry.daemon.com.au/). Seeing as it's more than likely the largest open source code base in our community I guess we have a particularly positive view on CF community development.
>Another barrier is that CF itself is closed source, and developers
>have no clear cut guarantee that the platform will exist in the
>future. Unlike with PHP where developers know it will exist, or .Net
>where developers know MS isn't going anywhere.
There is already a significant amount of CF opensource out there. Look at http://www.cflib.org/ or the MM Developers exchange. Look at the multitude of CF related blogs with there offering of tips and code: http://www.fullasagoog.com/ But perhaps more significantly, CF developers can participate in most Java based open source projects.
CF is in many respects much more feature complete than things like PHP and .NET. There are many things that just don't need building cos they already come out of the box -- many CF features already leverage open source community code: eg. XALAN (XML), AXIS (web services) and so on.
This is an interesting thread... I'm surprised more people haven't weighed in.
-- geoff bowers
Daemon Internet Consultants
Sydney, Australia
http://www.daemon.com.au/
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