Opensource(like Lucee) and Adobe ColdFusion What is the desirable status of the relationship between these two? A good model I’ve seen has to do with Linux Fedora and Red Hat. Fedora was a community version to challenge, experiment, and test new features externally, and Red Hat was to accept and install what had passed the tests stably in the community version as an enterprise version.

Let's just say that in the early days -- Macromedia ColdFusion, BlueDragon / OpenBD, Railo -- it was all a bit adversarial. There were a couple of efforts to get everyone going in the same direction but they fizzled out pretty quickly each time. These days, Adobe leads with the commercial product and Lucee implements whatever Adobe does for compatibility, in addition to all sorts of extensions of its own (some good, some bad). Sometimes, Adobe will implement a feature that Lucee added first but will generally do so in an incompatible way, which then forces Lucee to either change the feature it created or add an Adobe-compatible version of the feature as well. The Lucee project is pretty tiny and can't compete in terms of documentation or support -- and lately has made increasingly strange decisions about its CFML platform and its implementation of the language. I suspect Adobe would be perfectly happy for the Lucee project to be abandoned and, frankly, having just a single CFML implementation to target would make the lives of OSS developers a lot easier, instead of having to figure out a way to produce portable code across multiple versions of both engines.

All true. Of course Adobe would like it if their free open source competition disappeared. But Adobe ColdFusion is expensive, prohibitively so for many personal projects, some non-profits, and smaller organizations in general. Lucee provides a free alternative that I think is probably good for the CFML community overall, warts and all, and they've pushed Adobe into a number of welcome advancements, as you said.

@Sung Ham A big difference here is that Linux Fedora is a fork of Red Hat. So they are basically the same core code and features added to the community project and eventually be merged into RHEL. Lucee is a totally separate from-scratch open source CF engine with no code inherited from Adobe's closed source CF engine. Without a common lineage, there's no aspect of them being related per se or contributing to each other. They're just two servers that have their own implementation for compiling and executing code.

I think Sean summarized it very well. And like Brad mentioned, Lucee is not a fork, but its own product. Lucee is not ColdFusion, instead you can call it a CFML engine or runtime. There are similarities and differences, one is overblown and expensive, the other is lighter and open source. From my observations and conversations, the market for ColdFusion licensing is shrinking, not to mention the popularity of CFML itself. Teams still require ColdFusion to run enterprise systems, but if you don't need it, I would highly recommend Lucee.

As the official face (sorry about that) of Adobe ColdFusion, here's my take. I love Lucee. Maybe that's not popular among other members of Adobe, whatever, everyone has their opinions. But I'm a CFML developer. For me Lucee solves a certain set of problems. Adobe ColdFusion solves another set. Is there overlap? Sure. But for the most part, people get into their camps, and generally are civil to one another. We're all just in the #COMMUNITY# here (oops unscoped variable). As for Bill's statement that the market for ColdFusion licensing is shrinking, as someone who actually sees the numbers, no. It isn't. You can say you don't trust me as a rep of Adobe. That's fine. I said what I said. Anyone who actually knows me, knows I'm no mouthpiece or shill. I love CF. My job happens to be as the global rep for the Adobe version. And we're growing. Unfortunately a lot of that growth is silo'd and behind NDAs and inside big corp (which doesn't generally share code in public github repos). Every single year I've been here, Adobe ColdFusion has grown in revenue, in total customers, everything. Retention, net new, all of it. Specifically on the topic of OSS/paid and how ACF/Lucee should function, I think we have a good relationship right now. The lucee guys have my number, I have theirs. We're friends. We talk. If security or other items appear behind the scenes, we have back-channel discussions. Our number 1 focus is the community. Your safety. Security. The stability of the ecosystem. Because, we all know, a LOT of people go back and forth. Lucee to CF, CF to Lucee. Or like me for 10 years, both, based on the customers need. If Lucee went away I would be heartbroken, and it would be a dark day for the CFML community. There is room in the world for Lucee & Adobe ColdFusion. Plenty of it. Use cases for both abound. And please keep in mind, there's MANY ways to use ACF that aren't "buy a multi-thousand dollar license or ETLA". Hosting, AMIs, VPS. You might think I get free adobe sites. I don't. I pay a host company for a VPS. Its $90/month. Incredibly affordable. I run a bunch of stuff off it, including a fun new project I'm doing with a community member.

Hey Mark, Thanks for the explanation from an Adobe insider, very much appreciated. It's good to know my opinion was wrong... I consider that excellent news. My remark was based on what I've read and heard, with various reasons why some people have pivoted. Some because of the licensing costs, some because of different server languages that provide alternate design patterns, and some because of the current popularity of CFML itself. We all want to be on the winning team, right? Like others here, I continue to write CFML code because of how productive it is. With Lucee I love that fact you can write a complex OOP MVC app or a single purpose service thrown in a docker container. Maybe you can with ColdFusion too, but as a one-person development shop it's not easy to justify the expense. However, Sean did mention something else about Lucee that is true... they are small. So if you have read this so far, I have a crazy dream. A dream that Adobe would either sponsor or purchase Lucee, keep the team, and keep it open source. Why? because I believe if CFML was marketed better with an open source community, the sales of ColdFusion server licenses would increase. One hand would feed the other. Cheers, Bill