After a lot of researching on CPL vs GPLv3 and reading the comments in this discussion I have come to the following conclusion:
The change to GPLv3 from CPL will severly stunt FarCry's growth. Please Don't do it! Why? The future is plugins baby! With FarCry 5 being able to be deployed to shared hosting (and possibly compatible with Blue Dragon?) this is its first big chance to convert the masses, this is its first time it has a chance to not only be the best CF option for CMS or web application development but a real contender VS the Joomla, Mambo, Drupal's. FarCry 5 is a very slick framework with good out of the box functionality. Is Mambo or Drupal successful because of its good core features? Nope its the mountains of modules or plugins that have been developed by the community that are available that make these CMS's very attractive. Does ColdFusion currently have an army of developers willing to submit there work and contribute to open source projects? Not quite. The ability to easily develop & install plugins to FarCry 5 is great but it’s the amount of plugins + quality that is going to be to a major factor in whether it not only survives but thrives! GPLv3 will hurt plugin development not encourage it. What? The best way to encourage plugin development within the CF community is allow the ability to release and market them without restriction. I know there is plenty of love in the CF community but the majority of CF developers are unfortunately not selfless open source contributing types so you need to play to the strengths of the average CF dev. Forget about the typical FarCry 4 install at the moment (government, corporate etc) and think about the potential install base for version 5 with shared hosting...by keeping the CPL model you have the chance to make it a no brainer for every ColdFusion developer out there to pick FarCry for their next CMS based web app. If you change to GPLv3 and the majority of FarCry installs are under this license, plugin developers can't sell their plugins to be installed into GPL FarCry, they would be forced to distribute under GPL. You then get less plugins developed and the result being that FarcCry will always be behind the other major CMS's in terms of features. Here is my suggested scenario for FarCry's world domination using the current CPL licensing model and for Daemon to be rewarded for there awesome efforts: 1. Daemon release FarCry 5 under the current CPL and it gets hyped on blogs, at CFUG's, CF events etc. 2. Every CF man and his dog (aussie term) are wowed by how they can now easily install this great CMS and on shared hosting even! 3. CF developers everywhere are now thinking about how they can use this free open source CMS for their next CMS project or client sites. 4. The FarCry user base explodes. 5. Developing plugins for FarCry suddenly becomes an attractive option for revenue from CF development. 6. We see the release of a killer ecommerce plugin then a CRM plugin and someone even starts selling a SAP integration plugin. 7. Some of these classy plugins are commercially licensed by Daemon who as the developer of FarCry leverages their know how of FC. They also commercially license an extra sexy version of the FC CMS plugin with a Flex based admin. Because the project is licensed under CPL, Daemon can merge anything submitted to the OS CMS pluing into there own stuff. 8. Developers pitching FarCry for bigger projects/organisations can now tell companies they can easily do X,Y and Z using the commercially supported plugins out there. 9. Now that there is so many more developers using farcry, there are also many more keen to submit bug fixes and get involved in the direction and development of new out of the box functionality. The project rewards these people by having major contributors and companies as FarCry Project Contributors. 10. Adobe realising that FarCry is helping to drive new sales contributes money/resources. 11. A year goes by and the Blue Dragon Open source project has finally encouraged web hosts around the world to now offer CF hosting. 12. The FarCry user base reaches critical mass and thousands of non CF developers consider this cheap hosting that includes a CMS with option plugins. 13. Success!! Under a change to GPL the only way I could see FarCry reaching its potential would be if Today Blue Dragon Open Source was installed (like PHP) on every web hosting server and there was an army of open source contributing CF developers driving it forward. Okay so assuming that releasing FarCry 5 under the current CPL which gives it the best chance for success what about rewarding Daemon for their efforts? Well I see the following revenue opportunities for them: * commercially licensed FarCry * commercially licensed CMS and other plugins * support and training * developer certifications * partner or contributor certifcation. My motivation for seeing FarCry succeed is a selfish one, simply I want to be able to keep developing using ColdFusion. If FarCry 5 is successful that means I can keep pitching and developing using CF for a long time yet. So Geoff and the rest of the Daemon team I urge you to NOT change to GPL but keep the current CPL license for FarCry 5. Regards, Steve Harris. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "farcry-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
