I've seen plenty of anti-commercial software vitriol out there in OSS communities but I haven't seen it in the open cfml community. I would say that many (probably most?) people who are participating in open source side of CF (Railo, CFEclipse, OpenBD, projects on RIAForge, etc) have been cfml developers long enough that they were developing when there were no alternatives other than the closed-source ColdFusion engine. I've been a cfml developer since the early days with Allaire (wearing an Allaire tshirt right now actually) and so I have no problems using a commercial, closed source product. I suspect that most other folks are in the same boat. That makes the community different than, say, apache, php, ruby on rails, etc who may have spent most of their development lives using F/OSS and have more of a fundamental philosophical approach.
I've switched most of my development to Railo. Why? For a variety of reasons but primary one isn't that Adobe ColdFusion is not open source. I don't mind, at all, that they are a commercial company putting out commercial software. And, I'd say, the pricing is fairly reasonable, all in all. Instead, I find Railo to be a lot more responsive as a company, have better communication with the community and produce higher quality software that is more performant and better meets my needs as a developer. The fact that it is open source is a bonus and the other things that have come along with that (like the community provided extensions) are an appealing selling point as well. In other communities, I'd say that you might be right about OSS backers directing vitriol toward a commercial company, like Adobe, based on philosophy. I'd challenge you, however, to point to that sort of thing happening in the cfml community though. Cheers, Judah On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Mark A. Kruger <[email protected]> wrote: > > But wouldn't it be somewhat fair to say that commercial vendors (in general) > see a role for OSS while OSS people see little value in commercial products? > Most avid OSS folks I know think that commercial products gum up the > works... and yes, they are often full of vitriol about it on lists, blogs > etc. No one get's their ire up quite like a geek who feels like he has the > answers. Maybe I'm shielded but I don't see near the level of anti-OSS > verbiage out there. Do you? > > -Mark ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:341073 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
