Vince Bonfanti's Weblog: New Atlanta announces free open source BlueDragon edition

New Atlanta announces free open source BlueDragon edition

Posted At : Monday, March 10, 2008 6:56 AM | Posted By : Vince Bonfanti
Related Categories: BlueDragon

New Atlanta has announced plans to release a free open source edition of BlueDragon; there's a press release and FAQ on our web site. Here's a summary:

The BlueDragon/J2EE edition will be released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). This is the same license used by Sun for the OpenJDK, their open source edition of the Java platform.
The free open source edition of BlueDragon/J2EE will be fully featured, with only minor differences to remove dependencies on commercial libraries. The open source edition of BlueDragon/J2EE will be integrated, packaged, and distributed with other open source software such as Tomcat, JBoss, Apache, MySQL, Java (OpenJDK), and Linux.
We will continue to develop, support, and market a commercial edition of BlueDragon/J2EE under a dual-licensing model such as that used by MySQL. We are reviewing our pricing model for the commercial edition of BlueDragon/J2EE and will announce any changes in the next few weeks.
The BlueDragon.NET and BlueDragon Server JX editions are not being released as open source and will continue to be developed, supported, and marketed as commercial products. We are not planning any changes to the pricing models for these commercial products.
The current free (but not open source) BlueDragon Server edition will be discontinued when the open source BlueDragon/J2EE edition is released.
The first public "code drop" of the free open source BlueDragon/J2EE edition will happen prior to the CFUNITED-08 conference in June 2008.

In order to make the free open source edition of BlueDragon/J2EE a "community" project as much as possible, we're planning to form a steering committee to help guide future development. Let me know if you're interested in participating in this steering committee. Also, we're planning a Birds-of-a-Feature (BOF) session at CFUNITED-08, which may evolve into the first meeting of the steering committee; stay tuned for more info.

I'm currently in London for CFUNITED-Europe where I'm speaking on Wednesday morning (about "IIS 7.0 for CFML Developers", not open source BlueDragon/J2EE). My wife and I are doing the tourist thing, and I have some customer meetings scheduled, so I'll be slow to respond to comments here and to email until I'm back in the office on Monday. Look for me at CFUNITED-Europe if you're here.

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Sounds like awesome news for the future of CFML developers!

See you on wednesday!

MD

# Posted By Mark Drew | 3/10/2008 9:16 AM

What's the motivation for this? You talked about the "what," I'd be interested in the "why."

# Posted By Joe Rinehart | 3/10/2008 9:44 AM

What servers with you be able to run this on. I am wondering if it can be run on IIS (or Apache) or just on J2EE servers?

# Posted By Gerald | 3/10/2008 10:29 AM

Vince,

This is awesome news. We use the .NET edition right now, but if this spurs on lots of high quality development from the community I could see having to evaluate having a j2ee edition server too.

Are you planning a community resource site of some sort that would let people easily work together to enhance the product and share their enhancements with others?

Will your team be working to include the excellent developments from the community into the JX and .NET editions?

Kudos,
Nick

# Posted By Nick Voss | 3/10/2008 10:30 AM

Great news! Like everyone else I'm looking forward to more details, requirements, what got left out, etc... but it's a great day for CFML!

# Posted By Jim Priest | 3/10/2008 10:59 AM

Great move Vince. This effectively shuts down the arguments about CFML not be monetarily accessible.

# Posted By Rey Bango | 3/10/2008 11:40 AM

Wow! That's great news. I am assuming there are no license restrictions on commercial use like the older free version had?

Will the product be maintained & improved as it has been in the past, or is this more of an into the wild thing and the community owns it?

I too am curious about the why, but regardless of what it was, I applaud this step by New Atlanta, and this should really help adoption by the next generation of developers in school today.

# Posted By Jeff Gladnick | 3/10/2008 11:56 AM

great news indeed, cant wait for more details on this!

# Posted By Chris H | 3/10/2008 12:25 PM

Congratulations, Vince, this is a bold and exciting move! I do think that your BD.NET product would enjoy much greater success as open source (because of it's beautiful integration into .NET/IIS environments), but by the same token you wouldn't want to give away your crown jewels or cut off all your income streams while sailing uncharted waters.

Best of luck, I hope this works out.

# Posted By Gary Fenton | 3/10/2008 12:35 PM

This is great news. I look forward to the day I can 'sudo apt-get install apache2 mysql bluedragon'

(Linux, Apache, MySQL, BlueDragon - a LAMBDa server?)

# Posted By Fred B | 3/10/2008 1:01 PM

Back in May, 2006 you expressed some serious doubts about open sourcing BlueDragon:

http://blog.newatlanta.com/index.cfm?entry=B29E77D...
"I have to admit I still don't quite "get" open source in terms of it being a viable business model for software companies (though I see its value in other respects), so it's unlikely we'll go that route with BlueDragon. But I'd be interested in hearing what people have to say."

What made you reconsider?

# Posted By Tom Donovan | 3/10/2008 1:11 PM

Vince, this is great news.

Once the open-source version of BlueDragon is available, do you plan on marketing it to web hosting companies that don't currently offer CFML hosting plans? Younger/solo developers working for small clients are more likely to use hosting services rather than run their own server.

# Posted By Brian Swartzfager | 3/10/2008 1:27 PM

Wow, this is such exciting news! I know I've talked with you folks in the past about a lower cost entry fee to BlueDragon, particularly as we are seeing more and more interest in using virtual servers and Adobe has made that even more expensive with how they did the licensing on CF8. This goes a step beyond what I had hoped to see! I'm really excited to see how this will help revitalize CFML and open up more possibilities for people that have avoided it simply due to cost. And it certainly will garner a lot more interest in your company and the other excellent product offerings you have as well.

# Posted By Mary Jo Sminkey | 3/10/2008 8:11 PM

Hi Vince

Very good news.

We are planning to open source our Enterprise Digital Asset Management (integrated with web content management) as well.

By your announcement we will immediately start reworking our code to suite BlueDragon's code base.

Thus we will soon have a ColdFusion based Alfresco alternative!

Is there any way I can get in contact with you? We are based in Europe as well.

# Posted By Nitai Aventaggiato | 3/11/2008 5:41 AM

In response to Gerald's query about running BlueDragon for J2EE on Apache, you will need a J2EE app server like JBoss to run BD. That said, its relatively easy to integrate JBoss/BD with Apache. Steve Brownlee gives a very good tutorial on this at http://www.fusioncube.net/?p=111. While he uses CF for this, the steps are exactly the same for Blue Dragon. I've been running this combo for our internal sites for the last several months without any problems.

Another alternative is to use the native webserver that's in JBoss. Its not difficult at all to change the ports from 8080 to port 80.

regards,

larry

# Posted By Larry C. Lyons | 3/11/2008 8:55 AM

Vince,

Would you be available for a short interview for DZone.com? We'd like to ask you some questions about Open Sourcing BD.

DW

# Posted By Dan Wilson | 3/11/2008 4:21 PM

Vince,

As others have stated, this is great news for the future of CFML. Open sourcing the J2EE version should allow CFML to get picked up by virtual hosting companies, it should allow it to get easily installed into linux distributions, and start getting integrated into frameworks which would in turn grow the CFML market as a whole.

-Peter

# Posted By Peter Amiri | 3/11/2008 9:49 PM

The license Sun uses for the OpenJDK is not the GPLv2, but the GPLv2 with Classpath Exception. So does NewAtlanta intend to follow the example of the OpenJDK, or does NewAtlanta intend to release BD under a strict GPLv2?

# Posted By Jochem van Dieten | 3/12/2008 2:03 PM

Thanks for all the great feedback! Rather than respond to individual comments and questions, I'm preparing another blog entry to provide more details about our plans; I'll have that posted either tomorrow (Sat) or early next week.

Also, we've created a new forum on our web site specifically for discussion of open source BlueDragon:

http://forums.newatlanta.com/threads.cfm?forumid=A...

Please post questions there and I'll do my best to answer them.

# Posted By vinceb | 3/13/2008 1:29 PM

Whoops, tomorrow's not Saturday--it's Friday--but I'm going to be on an airplane most of the day tomorrow, where I plan to finish the new blog entry and get it posted by Saturday.

Cheers.

# Posted By vinceb | 3/13/2008 1:35 PM

Before I get too excited, I need to know what feature(s) this statement is going to affect.

"The free open source edition of BlueDragon/J2EE will be fully featured, with only minor differences to remove dependencies on commercial libraries."

What features will we loose due to "commercial libraries".

# Posted By Wil | 3/13/2008 2:14 PM

Wil, see my response here:

http://forums.newatlanta.com/messages.cfm?threadid...

Let's post further questions to the forums. Thanks.

# Posted By vinceb | 3/13/2008 2:32 PM

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