On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 6:38 AM, Justin Scott <jscott-li...@gravityfree.com> wrote: > When it comes to usergroups and conferences, and even the kinds of companies > that use ColdFusion, it has a lot to do with the culture around it. PHP, > Perl, Python, Lisp, C, Ruby, ASP.Net, Groovy, and most other languages are > free to use and deploy for whatever you want.
ASP.Net is only perceived to be free. It isn't really free - you have to pay for Windows server licenses to get it (and if you use SQL Server you're paying again there). When you talk about free in the context of those other languages, part of it is the open source culture and that means Linux instead of Windows and MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server. Just a nit-pick. I agree with your cultural observation overall. > ColdFusion is not (yes, we > have Railo but it hasn't gained a lot of traction yet). Nearly 25% of respondents in CFUnited's survey are using Railo: http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e2olvoj6g4ek9zt3/results You can argue that survey isn't representative of the overall CFML market but I think Railo has more traction than you might think. You're absolutely spot on with your next paragraph tho': > This one fact alone > causes a lot of new developers to choose other technology over ColdFusion. > ColdFusion was originally made for Windows, a commercial product which > requires licenses. It wasn't born of the open source culture like many > languages were. Many developers see ColdFusion as a language that is used > within companies who feel like they need to pay for licensing and support. > Those companies aren't sexy and the more "social" developers aren't > generally drawn to them. ColdFusion is associated with a closed-source > culture and set of ideas. This is obvious when you look at any large-scale > off-the-shelf CF app (shopping carts, forums, CMS systems and the like). > Other languages are open and you can do whatever you want with them and > there are healthy communities with lots of free and open source applications > you can deploy. With ColdFusion you have to be concerned about which > license you have, how many you have, and where you deploy it. Just > yesterday Adobe had an e-seminar about using "ColdFusion in the Cloud" and > they spent the first 20 minutes talking about licensing and what was and > wasn't a cloud and how you should have your legal team get in touch with > Adobe's legal team if you had concerns. That's not sexy to developers. It > turns them off and they run over to Ruby where they can just do what they > need to do without worrying about whether they have the right number of CPU > licenses or what their costs are going to look like if they need to scale to > a dozen servers. For large corporate's ColdFusion is a relatively easy sell - heck, Enterprise went up $1,500 to make it easier to sell in that market (it was perceived as "too cheap" before). After I left Adobe in 2007, I co-founded a startup and we spent months doing the whole VC tour / begathon. It was pretty soul-destroying :) Several VCs questioned our use of ColdFusion because of the licensing costs and I found myself having to justify how we could scale profitably using a commercial product instead of one of the other free, open source languages. I was a bit surprised the VCs cared about the technology but there you go... -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN Railo Technologies US -- http://getrailo.com/ An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Marg ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:329948 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
