Brandon Corbins Head Indianapolis Product & Technology Evangelist

Now that Adobe gobbled up Macromedia, I think that its time to let ColdFusion go to the wild. Yes, open source it.

For a long time PHP and ColdFusion have been like Microsoft and Apple. Many developers have had to do both, but for the most part ColdFusion only has a small following compared to the LAMPERS.

ColdFusion is a killer language - It really is, with its Java architecture and its insanely easy syntax, almost anyone that knows HTML can build some impressive stuff. With ColdFusion you are focused on what the application should do, instead of figuring out and fighting with how to build it (the same concept that makes Ruby on Rails so great).

But ColdFusion costs money. $5,000 dollars for the enterprise version, while PHP, Ruby on Rails and others are free (as in beer). No self respecting geek is going to spend a lot of personal time on something that they can not afford to run on a production server. Macromedia never realized this (or they did and didn’t care).

Adobe, open coldfusion to the open source community! Sell support packages, you need geeks on your side. The geeks really run the technical show - they are your sneezes and mavens. If you get more geeks loving coldfusion, you will have more people wanting Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Support, Flex etc.