Vince Bonfanti Interview on DZone
March 27, 2008 by Jim · 5 Comments
Dan Wilson interviews Vince Bonfanti about the recent BlueDragon open-source announcement.
This caught my eye:
We’re also investigating the possibility of creating a free VMWare appliance containing the full software stack including the Linux operating system, MySQL, JBoss or Tomcat, and BlueDragon.
I blogged about doing this almost a year ago… but unfortunately it wasn’t easily doable with Adobe ColdFusion.
He also goes into why they picked the GPL license (following the MySQL business model) and support (there will be none). Hopefully they WILL provide some type of community driven support area – mailing lists and/or forums so that the community can support itself.
Looks like Vince will be at cf.Objective doing a demo and releasing some code and that is just around the corner!
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It was a really good interview. I know Dan wasn’t exactly sympathetic to New Atlanta or BlueDragon so I think the questions were very probing and Vince’s answers illuminate a lot of the questions that some people seem to have around this announcement.
As I said on my blog, the announcement makes perfect sense to me and I really hope the community will get behind this effort and show that we’re more than a small, isolated group of developers tied to a “proprietary” product. I’ve challenged the community in the past to go out and “convert” a non-CFer and I think this project is a great opportunity for us all to go out and evangelize our favorite technology to PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, Java and even Ruby and Groovy people. This is an opportunity for our community to grow and to push the boundaries.
If the BlueDragon Open Source project is successful, it will bring more and more developers into the CF community, writing CFML, buying BlueDragon, buying Railo, buying ColdFusion. If the project fails, we’ll need to look at ourselves as a community and ask how committed are we really to CF?
why is it illegal to create a virtual machine using the developer edition is it to do with the license. I have created virtual machines using CF8, BD7, Smith (yet to create a railo image), to test applications. I set these up using Centos from scratch. I find this a great way to develop and setting up a new developer becomes extremely easy, especially when you start to use ANT to deploy to the virtual machine or deploy live etc.
I don’t think it’s ‘illegal’ for your own use – but I don’t know about the legalities of bundling that up and re-distributing it for example on the VMWare Appliance web site.
@Mark, you don’t say which product / edition you’re talking about so it’s hard to answer.
Read the Adobe ColdFusion EULA here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/
The current version is this PDF but always check the above page in case it has been updated:
http://www.adobe.com/products/.....mbined.pdf
The relevant quote is here:
“Except as otherwise expressly
provided in this Agreement, in the event Virtual Machines are installed on a Computer, each such Virtual Machine
shall be deemed to operate the Software on 2 CPUs (each, a “Virtual Machine CPU”), and the total number of
Virtual Machine CPUs plus the total number of physical CPUs on such Computer, shall be counted together for the
purpose of applying the limitations described in this Section 1.10(a).”
It goes on to explain that Development Edition licenses are per-server (and therefore not bound by VM issues); Standard Edition licenses are per-CPU (and *are* bound by the above CPU calculation for VM systems); Enterprise Edition licenses are per-physical-CPU (and are not bound by VM CPU calculation).
For New Atlanta’s BlueDragon Open Source Edition, the license – GPL – mandates that any bundle containing the original work (BD OS) must be GPL’d in total. So you could create a VM bundle that uses all GPL software and includes BD OS and your own GPL’d software. You could not, however, bundle your commercial / closed source application with BD OS – you’d have to ship your app separately with instructions on how to d/l and install BD OS. That is why GPL is considered both the “most open” open source license as well as being a “viral” license.
Hope that helps?
However, I am not a lawyer.
I use the developer edition for whatever CFML server I am developing on. I guess the concern I had was is it illegal to create a virtual machine running a developer edition and distribute this in the workplace for other developers to develop on. By the sounds of things it is not.
It would be nice for some of the CFML distributions to have a vmware image that you can download to trial a development server though.