An Open Message To Gert Franz And Railo
Wow. In a matter of a few days it seems the Open Blue Dragon project has imploded. First Neil Middleton’s post about a comment Vince Bonfanti made. Then Sean Corfield blogged a related post and a day later announces his resignation from the Open Blue Dragon project citing conversations that took place on the Steering Committee mailing list. We’ll probably never really know the full story but it’s a shame that the Open BD project will now probably be ostracized from the CF community.
Open Blue Dragon was always overshadowed by the bad blood that has existed between New Atlanta and Adobe.
Will Railo, with it’s clean history, be able to succeed?
Update: related blog posts:
- OpenBD, The Comminity and How I See it (Adam Haskell)
- Is Open BlueDragon Losing Momentum? (Andrew Powell)
- I resign the dragon… (Mark Drew) (Note: Mark indicates he resigned “a couple of weeks ago”)
- Farewell Open BlueDragon (Sean Corfield)
- New Atlanta offers ColdFusion to .NET/Java migration assistance (Sean Corfield)
- An Open Message To Gert Franz And Railo (Ben Forta)
- Answer to the open letter to Railo and me (Gert Franz)
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20 Comments
Man Jim quick to call it aren’t you? I think Sean’s post was a bit over reactive (a bit only). OpenBD is a great engine and should succeed/fail based of technical merit not emotion. I think we need a community group hug
I don’t think its fair to say this was due to the bad blood from Adobe and New Atlanta (though I am sure it’s there).
Seems to me this is due to NA walking away from CF and 100% of the success of openBD being put on the committee’s shoulders. The committee is comprised of lots of good people, but thats is a lot of work and stress.
I can’t blame NA, as business is business and they need to do whats best for the company, but their path isn’t a healthy thing for the CF world.
I don’t know much about Railo, but from people I chatted with the joining JBOSS, licensing, etc. help give it a much stronger base with which to be an OS project with legs.
Hopefully everything gets sorted out and we can all have friendly beers at CFUnited.
Darn it, Jim, you beat me to it!
I was just finishing up a very similar post. I have to learn to stop spending so much time writing such things.
I think Vince and Alan pretty much sunk the OpenBD ship (”loose lips sink ships”). Had Vince simply announced the migration services and left it at that, he could have argued that New Atlanta was simply offering a service desired by their customers, but implying that CFML/ColdFusion is an out-of-date web application platform is not the message you send if you truly believe in the value of CFML as a web application development language. As for what Alan said, the phrases Sean quoted in his blog post seem pretty clear.
Even if the OpenBD project continues on, I think they’re going to be playing second-fiddel to Railo once the open source Railo is out as a consequence of all this.
@Adam - Oh, I’m still rootin’ for anything open-source.
I’m really hoping the OpenBD and Railo folks have some open communication - it seems like there has already been some initial discussion and hopefully this latest turn of events won’t hinder any of that forward momentum.
I’m also curious about Smith - I haven’t really heard anything from them in the blogosphere during all this.
Disclaimer: I’d be saying what I’m about to say regardless of my involvement with OpenBD, and I’m saying this completely from a personal perspective, not as a member of the OpenBD steering committee.
It’s amazing to me that a supposed “community” uses terms like “ostracize” and is so incredibly quick to make judgments about things they know so little about. The fact that there was apparently even a “blog race” to see who could make this snap judgment the fastest just points out how silly things have become.
Those of you who have been involved with FOSS projects will know that this sort of personnel churn early on in a project is perfectly normal and healthy for projects. It’s only been a month since the code for OpenBD became available, and less than a week since the Railo announcement. There is much road ahead for both projects.
Perhaps the most amazing thing in all of this is that the people actually involved in working on the various CFML engines are talking to each other in a collegial way and are interested in doing what’s best for the community. The only ones setting up separate camps, choosing sides, and driving wedges in the community, oddly enough, are people who aren’t even involved with these efforts. We’re all going to benefit from where CFML is going so I just don’t understand the negativity.
Based on the emails (yes, some quite nasty), blog comments, etc. I received recently, I realize people have made all sorts of judgments about my resignation as an Adobe Community Expert as well, but frankly this blog post and others like it epitomize my #1 reason for choosing to spend my time doing other things.
What great feats we could all accomplish if we expended our efforts in a positive way instead of tearing each other down on blogs.
@Matt, just blogging my opinion… I certainly didn’t mean to come across as “tearing each other down on blogs”?
Since we don’t have the ‘other side of the story’ it’s difficult to know what exactly occurred but from someone outside, this ‘churn’ was not too positive.
With that said I DO hope OpenBD and Railo succeed. As you said we’re early in this process but I really see the old “Adobe ColdFusion” centric community morphing into what will hopefully be a “CFML” community with all the big players getting along. As we’re already finding out this process probably won’t be without it’s painful bumps but I think in the end we’ll be stronger because of it.
I’ll go along with Adam and say we all need a group hug
This is silly. We’re all on the same team. It doesn’t have to be an Obama vs Clinton shoot out. It shouldn’t be about personalities or politics. I believe the community has held cfml together for many years, so a rift in the space-time continuum, oh, I mean community, is a bad thing. Personal disputes shouldn’t be made public in case unfair representations are made or blog readers choose “sides”. We’re all in it for CFML coolness and productivity, right? United we stand… Come on, group hug!
@Matt Woodward: Speculating on the fragmentation of a project, especially in light Sean resignation and what he quoted, is not out of line at all. Sean is not some bozo off the street just posting an arbitrary comment and his feedback is important to a lot of folks that are seriously considering OpenBD.
I can tell you that I have been a big advocate of New Atlanta & BlueDragon for a long time and reading Sean’s post, especially with regards to Alan’s comments, left me wondering what the heck is going on with OpenBD. If Alan isn’t interested in the CF community, as Sean asserted, then OpenBD is actually a disservice to the ColdFusion community and will only serve to splinter things further. I have tremendous amount of respect for Sean and I would find it hard to believe he would post a false statement. So I would hope that Alan posts something to clarify Sean’s statements because I will be next to post my speculations on Open Bluedragon if he doesn’t.
And on a closing note, I’m part of the jQuery OSS project and can tell you we’ve not had this type of drama in our project. And no, personnel churn is not the norm unless something is seriously screwed up.
On a related note - Ben Forta on the Railo announcement:
http://www.forta.com/blog/inde.....-And-Railo
@Rey–that’s your experience with jQuery. Every project is different. Just because people leave, particularly at the outset of a project, doesn’t mean something is “seriously screwed up.” In my experience when something’s just getting off the ground this is completely normal.
It looks like not only Sean Corfield resigned of OpenDB. Mark Drew also: http://www.markdrew.co.uk/blog.....agon-again.
Reading over my earlier comment, I realize that I didn’t express my thoughts on this matter very clearly. I don’t speak “off the cuff” very well, which is why I never got around to finishing my own blog post on these events.
Do I think the OpenBD project has “imploded?” No, but I think Sean’s resignation is definitely a loss. Do I think what Vince and Alan said hurt the image of the OpenBD project, pehaps (only time will tell) fatally? Yes, I do. Even if they were somewhat quoted out of context, why they would say something even remotely dismissive of CFML and the CFML community when they knew there were concerns about the motivation for the project already floating out there is beyond me.
Do I think the other OpenBD committee members have the best interests of the ColdFusion/CFML community at heart, and will do what they feel is right for CFML? Yes, I do, but I think their their mission to find acceptance and adoption of OpenBD just got a lot harder, both because of these continuing questions and because there’s now another option for open-source CFML (Railo).
Even if we don’t all agree on the impact or significance of these events on the OpenBD project, I think we can all agree that a number of events occurred this week that could reshape the future of CFML development (for better or for worse), and that is a valid topic for a blog post.
@Matt
Yes, but what about Rey’s other concerns? Specifically Alan Williamson saying that he’s “sick and tired of hearing about the ‘CF community’”, and “so called ‘rock stars’ within the CF community are just a lot of empty vessels” (according to Sean). With all due respect, I don’t think you can blame anyone for having concerns about that.
I also resigned from the OpenBD project today and I am honest enough to realize that I am much less significant than Sean or Mark and that is fitting, as they have contributed much more that I have to the community.
The success of OpenBD will be determined by the community it was crafted to serve, the CFML community which came out of ColdFusion along with DBML. Alan Williamson is a very astute person with a vision many years ago to use the benefits of ColdFusion in the Java world and he should be recognized for that. I am sure he had the choice to create something totally different but he chose to emulate ColdFusion, which already existed. ColdFusion had succeeded because of the community and that community should not be underestimated nor derided, in my opinion.
@radekg:
Mark Drew resigned because he did “buggerall” in the project, and as such wanted 2 leave his spot 2 some1 who actually was able 2 put some effort in2 the project
I’m with Matt Woodward on this: get the facts, all the facts, b4 bullying anyone anywhere. Especially in comments in blogs where the perceived anonymity brings out the beast in many…
@Matt, you know I have the utmost respect for you and consider you a friend but I think you are going to easy on the project because of your attachment to it perhaps. It seems to be surrounded by the constant melodrama and antics that have followed New Atlanta from day one. Is some of this perhaps a matter of a negative perception driven by past incidents? I’m sure that it is…but to use a sports analogy, sure Rasheed Wallace often gets called for technicals he may not completely deserve, but 9 times out of 10 he does deserve them and, in the end, brought this negative reputation upon himself. You would think Vince and Alan would be especially careful about what they say in light of the negative feelings that exist in the community. Alas, they weren’t and that in and of itself says a lot about them.
I think that the bad blood generated by NA has invariably tainted Open BD, like it or not. Conversely, by joining up with JBoss, that gives Railo near instant credibility in not only the CF Community, but the Java community as well, and the open source community as a whole. Of course, this is all just my perception, so it’s subjective. But that’s what an opinion is. Is anyone really going to be objective about this subject? I don’t think so.
@Brian–what you say goes both ways. Many, many, MANY people are being unnecessarily hard on the project (and me personally) because of stuff that has nothing to do with the merits of the project itself but are based more on rumor, innuendo, and personal bias. That says a lot about those people as well.
@Matt - You know I don’t hold anything against you (or anyone else for that matter) for joining the openBD board. We have had a difference of opinion on the matter from day one and I know we discussed it at cf.objective. I think everyone who joined the board did so out of interest in bettering the CFML community. I think if people are making this personal that is a mistake. I think Adam’s post somehow singled you out and made you the brunt of criticism very unfairly and I am certain that can be very discouraging, especially when folks forget the long list of contributions you have made to the community over the years.
Nonetheless, I think it is difficult to expect people to forget the past with New Atlanta and Alan and Vince have been less than careful in what they said despite knowing it is unwise to do so. If those words have caused the defections of Sean and Mike then it was even more unwise. The inclusion of people such as yourself, Sean, Mark and Mike took a big step in legitimizing openBD despite the initial skepticism of folks who distrusted New Atlanta and their intentions. Therefore, its really not a huge surprise that these defections so soon have seriously damaged that perceived legitimacy.
Clearly we are dealing in perceptions here which are very much tied to emotion and bias and are completely subjective (and often don’t clearly reflect the reality). Still, that is part of why Alan wanted repected folks like you on his board in the first place, to influence perception. He made the bed…
FWIW - I added all the related blog posts above (if I missed any let me know).
I really like Gert’s reply to Ben’s post. I’ve mentioned it in the past as well but I agree with Gert - I think we’re getting to the point that some kind of “CFML expert group” needs to be organized with members from ALL involved parties: Adobe, OpenBD, Railo and Smith.
Ideally we could put all these differences behind us and move forward.