A few weeks ago Dan Wilson and I met for lunch to swap some Flex books (thanks Dan!) and we both commented how we rarely get out of the office. So I thought it might be fun to have a casual ‘geek’ lunch once a month or so just to:

1. Get out of the office
2. Meet some fellow developers in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area
3. Discuss geeky stuff

This is all very casual. Can’t show up – no sweat!

Ideally we could meet 2-3 times a month in various locations around the Triangle. Then everyone could attend a lunch and meet nearby CFers.

• Work in Chapel Hill – announce a lunch and meet there…
• Work in Raleigh – let’s meet downtown!

The ultimate goal is to stir up some activity in the local ColdFusion community and get more people out to the TACFUG meetings!!!!

We’ve scheduled our first meeting for this NEXT Friday (April 25th)! More information can be found on the TACFUG website.  If you are interested please leave a comment on the TACFUG site so we can get an idea oh how many to expect.

Lots of great stuff coming out of the recent Blue Dragon open-source announcement.

Vince has a GREAT write up on his blog – in particular point #6 which I’m going to quote because it is so good and really explains what is so important about open-source:

It’s often said that most people are only interested in the “free” and not the “open” in “free open source.” That is, most people only care that they’re getting something they don’t have to pay for and aren’t interested at all in the source code. I happen to believe this is true; I’ve used (and still use) many open source software products for which I’ve never cared to look at the source code (Firefox and MySQL, to name two). That’s OK; the reason “open” is important is that it guarantees that “free” means “free forever.” Unlike free–but not open source–commercial products such as ColdFusion 4.0 Express or the free BlueDragon Server edition, which can be “taken away” at any time by their corporate owners, an open source license can never be rescinded. Releasing under the GPLv2 provides confidence to the user community that the free open source BlueDragon edition and all future enhancements to it will always be both “free” and “open.”

Another interesting thread has come up within many of the comments – how does one contribute TO these open-source projects?

Every open-source bit of software I’ve used before usually has had contact information included within a readme, the author may have a blog, etc. But YOU need to be proactive. Mark Drew didn’t come to be and beg me to work on the CFEclipse site.

I love CFEclipse, know nothing about Java, but still wanted to contribute something to the project. I initially started out adding bits of content to the Trac wiki. I became more involved on the mailing list. I setup the FAQ on the wiki. Recently I asked Mark if he would like some help maintaining the website (he agreed!) and I recently relaunched the ‘new and improved’ CFEclipse.org site. Mark Drew is too busy working on CFEclipse (and his regular 9-5 job) to hound people to help out, and I imagine that is the same case with all the other popular open-source folks in our community like Ray Camden.

So… If you have a particular project you like – get involved: Contact the author! Join the mailing list (or start one!) Ask them what they need help with! Even if you don’t program there are usually lots of things like documentation, mailing list assistance, and a host of other things that you can help out with.

There is a GREAT list online: How to Contribute to Open Source Without Coding

Go get involved!

OK – so I’m reading all the comments on the recent “ColdFusion” is dead posts and trying to figure out what we can do as a community to help spread the word that ColdFusion is NOT dead.

One thing I noticed is the ColdFusion community is a bit ‘closed’. We all post all these great tutorials on our blogs – but we don’t do a very good job of letting the outside world know about what is going on with the ColdFusion community.

Have you heard about DZone?

• DZone is a free link-sharing community for developers
• anyone can submit new links to the incoming queue
• members vote on upcoming links to determine what gets promoted
• everyone can browse, search and comment on links

I just emailed them and suggested they add a “ColdFusion” tag. All the existing ColdFusion entries are posted under ‘other languages’…

I’d encourage all ColdFusion bloggers – when you blog about something – zip over there and submit a link back to your post – sure it takes a few minutes – but it helps spread the word outside the ColdFusion community!! And email them to add a ColdFusion tag while you are at it :)

I’m sure there are other sites like this – please leave a URL in the comments if you know of any and help spread the word: ColdFusion isn’t dead!

* and despite the picture above – I’m not a Twisted Sister fan!