Does anyone know why we all of a sudden have a third CF-product out there, that seems in direct competition with Lucee? The boxlang tooling, with it's CF-tag en cfscript type of writing code, but only with a bx: prefix? Isn't it better to keep putting effort into Lucee instead of creating a third niche-product to have to deal with?

boxlang has a compatibility module so existing lucee code should run as it currently does. As to why, there was a whole big discussion about that, I'll see if I can find some public info if one of the Ortus folk don't chip in first.

OK, so control and current Open Source tooling isn't reacting fast enough to our wants and needs and wishes. Too bad they didn't decide to chip in with and for Lucee to make is that what they wanted it to be. We'll see where this goes, but seeing that Lucee:lang didn't make it, maybe this will die as well, outside of the Ortus world of influence. Maybe it will become the next CFML-language everyone uses, but first I'd like to see some more influx of young people using CFML. We have a challenge there ahead of us, at least in the Netherlands specifically and in Europe in general.

I can't speak for Ortus, but pretty sure they were heavily involved with Lucee for years. They are also out there plugin BoxLang at JVM conferences so targeting a new audience (not just the CFML world)

OK, I like the second explainer video! Seems interesting! I do understand it is more than just a language, but what I had seen of it recently was just redoing in boxlang what is now done in CFML. But the explainers seem to tell another story!

They were recently sponsors of Jfokus in Sweden 🙂

My thoughts were initially similar in that it needs clear 100% commitment to being and remaining open source (100% not just some features) for life and not partially commercialized like commandbox is. I think Lucee could succeed further with allowing more folks in the community (globally) to have power to drive things with Lucee vs a few individuals leading its path forward. Not against boxlang, but true open source is where the world flourishes today.

Yes, I guess that is why I never really walked down the ColdBox path, even though I'm a ColdBox Hero, from Zero 🙂 I like the TDD aspect of it, but redoing this in current or legacy projects is quite a task. Hence I love true open source. I was a BlueDragon fan from day one, until it was commercialized and went to DotNet. And there are more sortlike projects that were open source and then so popular it went commercial (like Mura CMS, now MASA CMS). I understand the need and want behind it from the people building and driving said projects, but it makes it difficult when you cannot pay thousands of dollars per year or month even to make use of the tooling. Some payment it possible of course, but not in the pricerange like Mura CMS went with version 10! Still exciting to see where this will go.

I like having alternatives. not all work well for me (yet), but that's ok. I currently find it pretty easy to swap between acf and lucee; less so between them and bl, but that has been improving.

I basically see it as a new language that happens to support CFML. If they want to charge $ to support it - more power to them. The days of 'open source = free' are long gone.

ColdBox, CommandBox, BoxLang, etc are

true open source

and have been for a long time (well, BoxLang is new). What we charge is for additional services like enhanced support or some additional commercial addons, etc. You can use all these products for free. We are big believers in open source and that will not change.

Apparently you are unaware of the Apache Foundation 😂

Lucee is open source - if you don't like what they are doing, Fork it - Ortus - namely @bdw429s - has been involved with Lucee since it was called Ralio -- A lot of the ortus offerings are based upon or have contributed to Lucee. Ortus has its niche, but I will not be jumping ship to Box,- As for comments about how "Lucee" works, write a plugin or anything else lucee related and throw a gist up. They are one of the more receptive open-source projects regarding change. If you hate the way it's run, start your own project. We all can use more - not less active development in Coldfusion.

Yes understood but open source is 100% not 95% imo @garciadev

It is 100%. Our support offerings are not free though. 😉 A few addons are not open source, and they are not part of the core product.

@Patrick by that logic, wordpress would be like .00001% open source. the extras that are closed and people charge for are not needed to run it.

I have nothing to do with Ortus but it is not fair to say that they have not made an investment in Lucee. I know they've spent tons of time and money supporting LAS over the years. Their products support Lucee, they're all over the Lucee Jira board. But Lucee is controlled and governed by a handful of individuals and those individuals are largely absent from this community (the Slack, at least) except for the occasional announcement. So if Ortus decided to go their own way, one may presume that they had their reasons.

I am an Ortus Patreon member I know, but its not just “support” my specific reference is Commandbox mutl-site or however you guys reference it is a paid thing, not a “support” its a feature of the code…not a human assistant “support”

Now Ortus is ALSO controlled by a handful of individuals -- or even one individual -- but if I have some input or a complaint or just want to shoot off my mouth on some subject, I know which handful of individuals is going to be easier to find and be made to listen to my blather

@Matt Jones wordpress went to shit with their leader again by having too much control and flipping it into the dumpster and shaking up that community

We have PRs waiting on review from LAS going back years

@sknowlton I never said they did not make an investment in Lucee…never, unless you are referring to someone else.

Just heard from Lucee that all external PR's have been solved as of late. At least that was the message from Gert at the Mid-Michigan CFUG.

Definitely not all of them 🙂

AFC , cut us a check -- Box -- Cut us a check for support and about half a dozen enhanced codes we maintain -- Lucee - Free - if you have a moment, add code or feel free to tip --- Still complaining as Free isnt free enough..

he prob meant all the ones he is willing to do…again control issue around Lucee there @sknowlton

Box -- Cut us a check for support and about half a dozen enhanced codes we maintain

that is not quite true. We offer a ton of free support in many places. Our team members are active in the community including CFML Slack. If you want personalized support or specific functionality, then yes, we can provide that for a fee.

We also offered once to underwrite a bunch of updates to things we cared about and had a call with the guy who at the time was their business rep and they never got back to us. I think everybody is accustomed to open source projects sometimes not being responsive in the way you might wish because their priorities are not necessarily your priorities, and even if you throw time and money at them, you can move the needle but ultimately it's open source, not your stuff But I contrast that with all of the *box software that is open source that has sustained our company for years and the system through which we ask about it, make suggestions, offer improvements, and there, too, we do not always get our way and sometimes it's weeks or months before our priority becomes their priority, but nothing has ever just languished. It's a model for how community-driven software should be developed and obviously I wish they'd give away all rather than just some of Boxlang but I also want them to still be in business 20 years from now

People can, and do, use our products completely for free, which is great.

The latest pre-7 releases have AI debugging, which has aided in the development and debugging of Lucee. there are a lot of internal items, documentation, scripts, extra, that all require more work, and it would be great to have more hands on deck, so to speak.

At the end of the day I'm still always amazed when @bdw429s replies to my stupid questions after all these years LOL

the brad-bot is a model of modern cybernetics

I understand that when you hit your head against a wall in your own opinion for an open source project and it is not moving in line or with the speed as your own vision or future plans, that you make a decision to make your own engine and platform comparable to what you have been supporting in many ways in the years before.

@garciadev My comment is not a "hit" or against Ortus - @bdw429s is literally one of the most responsive members of the Coldfusion community. If anything that speaks volumes for Ortus -

To make myself clear YES ORTUS is great, amazing and loved them forever. My point is about the term “open source” vs “freemium” AND also, starting as 100% open source and then getting a gathering and then converting into a biz model is shady imo.

Oh good grief. I can't imagine a more non-shady group of people...

What feature of Box products that is open source is no longer open source? Some new premium features may be, but that was never part of the open source offering. I do agree that starting as open source then closing it and going commercial is not great. I am just clarifying that is not what Ortus is doing. 🙂

They are trying to run a business. They have been outstanding members of the community since they started. People have been asking for what is now BoxLang for years. I still remember Joe Rineharts list of things to 'fix' in CFML.

So I've learned that boxlang is much more than just another CFML-dialect or -engine, and that it is possible to do much more with it. I will be watching from the sidelines and see where it takes the CFML-world and other worlds and see where it intersects our needs and wants.

So why not break off all open source solutions to a secondary non-profit foundation with community able assure its life-time open source and keep your freemium items under Ortus? @garciadev

BoxLang is its own new language with multiple runtimes and module support. If you want to run CFML code, use our web runtime with CFML compatibility module. ACF and Lucee only have a web runtime for all intents and purposes. If you don't need that, you can build applications with whatever runtime you need.

Are you serious, you have zero items that are sold other than humans talking/supporting a person who purchases “support” @garciadev

You don't have to use Redis on your site. It is extra.

Exactly its a freemium

I think I disagree with you regarding

basic features

. There are a ton of features that are a lot more than

basic

with all our product offerings. You are referring to specific niche functionality that we offer as products. Many people never use Redis and run fine without it. BTW, the Redis add-on is for

Lucee

. That is not an Ortus open source project, although we contribute to it and have for years.

Well recap 2 missed things, so 1. Why not break these “true open source” projects into a non profit foundation with a board? 2. Why do you refer to them as products if they are an open source “project”. What i am saying is your website lists just the general projects like Coldbox, Testbox etc

Who is supposed to manage this board? Where does the infrastructure to support it come from? This was all tried years ago with OpenCFML Foundation and while it was certainly a good effort - it basically fizzled.

As for using the word

product

vs

project

I don't see that as more than a preference. ColdBox, and others, are both projects and products.

@Jim Priest well as everyone has stated Ortus is extremely supportive of their projects; so why wouldnt they be very active in a board with a few of their team members for example combined with heavy users in the community.

Just catching up on this thread 🙂 As stated above, Ortus was a paying LAS member for years and we reached a place where we weren't able to have the impact and see the vision we needed to happen in that environment. That was a major force that spurred us to "build a better mousetrap". We had a vision larger and more aggressive that we simply couldn't reach without a fresh start. @Patrick You are wrong about multi-site. That was how we first announced it, but we changed course on that before release because there was no good way to enforce it. open source licensing generally applies to projects (think repos) and where we landed was all the code in the main CommandBox repo is licensed under Apache 2.0 and that's that. ONLY code in a separate project/repo can be licensed separately. Our CommandBox service manager is an example. It is not open source licensed, and it lives elsewhere. You are free to use multi-site all you want as it is part of the open source project. We had originally been looking at following CouchBase, Redis, or Elasticserach, who use special "source-available" licenses which allow them to legally restrict usage. That didn't feel "open source" enough to us and we dropped the idea because we valued open source more than commercializing features. You're welcome 🙂 Every open source project at Ortus is 100% open source. We also sell support. We also sell commercial modules. This is the same as Lucee, mind you. They write custom modules for their clients and the offer paid support through their member companies like Rasia.

We had that convo a long time back Brad regarding multi-site guess I didnt follow after that announcement. But what about my other questions, why not open this up to true open source based foundational aspect (boxlang for example in its early days) vs a biz drive?

@Sebastiaan Naafs - van Dijk I feel like your initial question has been answered over the course of the thread. Creating a new CF-compat engine wasn't something we did glibly. In fact, I talked Luis out of it for years due to the risk and cost involved, but we got to a point where Ortus itself needed to move forward in a way we weren't able to do so otherwise. There were a LOT of reasons. • we felt we could do open source better • we felt we could do support/commercial licensing better • we felt we could build a better/smaller/faster runtime • we wanted more deployment options like serverless • we wanted to cut the ties with the servlet • We wanted to market a fresh JVM language to Java or any developer • we felt we had a bigger, more comprehensive vision for java interop and language design • we felt we could document better • we felt we could build better tooling the list goes on and on. You can certainly decide whether or not we've succeeded at any of these, but we wanted a whole lot more than just another way to run CFML.

it also makes waffles

> why not open this up to true open source based foundational aspect I have no idea what this means. Ortus is more along the lines of Pivotal, not Apache, but in many ways we're also like an open source foundation. We've taken in many OS projects in the CF space over the years and given them new life. Apache specifically gets revenue from corporate sponsorships and donations. We have a patreon but it isn't NEARLY enough to feed out families. Many open source foundations offer paid support. What I'm particularly confused by is the idea that just because I've published an open source project, you think you now have a right to every line of code I write? Why would I be obligated to give out everything I make for free? Ortus has prolly put almost half a million dollars into developing and creating BoxLang to date. And so far, every line of code we've written in open source. Why should we not create some Enterprise modules that are outside the core functionality that are of interest to corp and gov to help recoup those costs? Nothing is preventing you from writing your own Redis module, etc We've created the most extensible and modular CF engine to date, so it should be easy. Us writing a Redis cache connector is not us taking a step back from open source. It's simply creating avenues to monetize enterprise features around our open source ecosystem- a software tale as old as time. Believe it or not, our kids to require eating 🙂

where is the github for this recipe, I will run the tests

@bdw429s break away all of the open source projects under a non-profit foundation where others in the community can help with the drive of the org board and not a project being solely decided on by a business decision aspect? That is what I meant.. And nothing stops ortus for being #1 obviously vendor for support, premium aspects of the projects - paid modules etc. Creates a separation about the drive of a project (specifically thinking of boxlang here). Shouldnt affect the biz since there is a passion for the product and clearly revenues are generated that keep the biz afloat so project control shouldnt matter in the open source realm right?

I'll also add (and I love Lucee), I feel Lucee has done particularly poor at monetizing their premium extensions and support, to the point that they've always struggled with money and have severely limited their team of 1/2 a developer due to this. The lack of more prominent paid features has actually been a detriment to Lucee IMO.

Thats my point, it wouldnt solely be run by Ortus

> the community can help with the drive of the org board To be honest, we've seen this and it doesn't work. Not in a community of this size. I was the chair of the Lucee TAG during its existence and a very (internally) vocal member of the LAS board. They were both, in a way, dysfunctional and ineffective. We always welcome input form the community in the form of ideas, or code and we've found a "benevolent dictatorship" if you will works much better at driving at a vision. If we announced BoxLang 2 years ago (which is when dev began) and publish an empty repo and accepted any pull requests and let the community organize a board to drive it, how far along do you think we'd be?

Well I wouldnt see your effort decrease because its already claimed as “open source” you would still be equally devoted no? As an org.

I can say the same thing to you. You can be equally devoted to contributing to an open source project owned by Ortus as an opensource project owned by a random board of community members, right? There is no upside to a separate org we don't control and tons of downside. Ask The Railo Company (Gert and Micha) how it worked out for them when they handed out the rights to their baby to a board of people. They lost their trademarks and 10 years of effort. We believe in our ability to drive the vision and progress of our projects, and we also value the input of the community and will continue to incorporate it.

There's a reason why 'design by committee' is generally not a compliment

image.png

Not what I was getting at but nice deflection, also that implies that anyone else besides Ortus are idiots about the core products @garciadev

I didn't say that at all, but I do think that the people who created Box et al are really knowledgeable about it. I also think your comments about what Ortus should or shouldn't do, while interesting, are moot. I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but it kind of comes across as you telling us that you know better how to run our business than we do. We are doing what we do and have a proven track record of success. I'd prefer to focus on the positive. 🙂

All of my feedback have been questions of why not an org amongst giving a community some push to prevent the situations that were initially discussed in this convo like Mura for a fast example

I basically answered that above. It's not because of the idiocy of the community, it's because of the inaction. We've seen this setup and nobody has ownership, noone drives the vision, and nothing gets done.

But as stated earlier, Daniel said Ortus is fully committed to the projects, so why would that decline?!

Mura could have just as easily happened if it were under another org. The people behind it stopped contributing and created a closed source project based on the open source one. The open source was still open sourced and was carried on by MASA. None of that neccessarily would have been avoided by having a separate org.

Mura converted to a $$$$ situation! Thats my entire point of this

Ultimately I don't think you can prevent any project or product or entity from mismanagement. There is some general notion in open source that community governance will prevent an individual or an oligarchy in control from going rogue or just making poor decisions, and sure, that could happen, but that's only a feasible solution where you have sufficient community interest, expertise, and -- most importantly -- the money to keep everything rolling. I think in this case it is a solution in search of a problem. We already know what doesn't work. Mura/Blue River had little (not none, but little) community involvement and ultimately made decisions to keep their company afloat, for better or worse. It's not really an analogous situation or product or set of problems. Having made such a big investment, Boxlang's success is critical to Ortus. People whose salaries depend on Ortus being a thing go to sleep at night thinking about how to make it better. That happens a bunch with Lucee, too, but the way the gears turn over there is not conducive to translating that impulse into actual progress. I guess I'm not sure what problem, other than a hypothetical future where Ortus turns around and quadruples the price for Boxlang and leaves the community hanging, is at play here ... because if Ortus wanted to milk the CFML community then they could've done it long before now and without inventing Boxlang. 🙂

Very true, we didn't create BL to make money on it. We may never break even, but that wasn't the point. We created BL to solve a problem and fill a void we and our customers had. And at the same time, would have been remiss not to share it with the world. BoxLang would have been a truly terrible attempt at a money grab for sure.

This has been tried before - OpenCFML, Team CF. I think at it's core it's a time issue. It's very difficult to manage something like that and get people involved for a long term commitment. There is the initial excitement - "Hey it's open source!" and then over a period of time people move on and you have a stagnant project/product/whatever. It seems to me if anything Ortus has looked at these other projects, Lucee, etc and sort of figured out what did and didn't work and are approaching this in their own unique way.

So where is the insurance backed guarantee that the Mura situation will never in 1 billion years it would never change shift into that situation?! 5 million to the community with any claims for users of boxlange etc legal lingo etc?

Well, firstly, you aren't obligated to a single line of my future code that I write. Sounds harsh, but it's true. If I stop contributing to BL tomorrow, I don't owe you a thing. The "insurance" you speak of is the solid legal precedent in upholding software licensing laws. Which state every line of code released under the open source license in BoxLang (or Mura, Lucee etc) will always be open source and available for you to fork and use under the terms of the license. That's all open source promises you. It doesn't promise you the future fruits of any else else's labor, it promises what you can do with the existing code. You may be correct in being distrustful of people to contribute to open source stopping in the future, but that risk exists in literally every open source project in existence.

This was a good summary I recently read - at the end of the day - the "open source" world is changing: https://www.startuphakk.com/is-open-source-dying-a-deep-dive-into-its-challenges/

True, Masa did come to life… but even this is really such a tiny project so 🤷‍♂️ not mainstream enough to be accepted at a larger scale until it grows in maybe 5-10 years. Also circles back to my situation when it did come out, was if Coldbox would be solely eventually boxlang’ed only in the future but I have been advised that would never become the situation….so still holding my breath on that too heh

Right, and my point is that those hypothetical futures aren't really influenced IMO by the ownership of the code. If the contributors feel like moving on, they will do so regardless. Again, this boils down more to trust in the people than it does legal ownership of the codebase. Ortus believes the best way to manage our open source projects -- keeping their vision alive, their development active, and sponsoring them -- is how we're doing right now. Open source software foundations don't ensure future contributions. Apache is full of abandonware.

Fair enough sir

Late joining this thread, but in a nutshell, Ortus' approach to open-source in the CFML community seems to have been working much better than what anyone else has tried before. This might sound more harsh than I mean it, but Ortus are the folks that get shit done. I can't remember the exact phrasing I used in my CFCAMP 2024 talk about BoxLang, but it was along the lines of: "BoxLang's first preview release for a private group had better tooling support and support for tooling authors than what any other CFML server has currently available". I fully stand to that, and that's the spirit it needs. Will BL become a success outside of the CFML niche? Who knows! But at least Luis, Brad and their team are trying. Essentially it needs a good chunk of luck as well - Jetbrains' Kotlin only became a thing because totally unexpectedly the Android dev community started to use it.

When I first heard the news about BL, my knee-jerk reaction was "Oh no Ortus is trying to monetize". However with time, I realized the opposite was true. Ortus has done great work so far on Boxlang and deserves kudos. I do get where Patrick is coming from for the most part, but Brad really explained his side perfectly. I love working with Lucee and have for years, but is it good for Lucee to have a competitor? You're darn right it is, Lucee (and Adobe) need a swift kick in the rear.

Yea I agree they both need a good kick butt I tend to think from a business perspective, support and maturity of a platform.

I'm sure everyone here (ok probably no one) lol wonders what the Adobe shill in the room thinks. Here's my full unfiltered opinion: Providing alternative solutions in the CF space is good for the community and ecosystem. Choice is GOOD. Competition is good. As long as we all respect each other and compete in good faith (and I haven't seen anything to indicate otherwise), its an absolute boon and the big winners are the users of the systems. BoxLang is making ACF focus harder on where we want to go. Lucee has always been unafraid to innovate and try things. The vast majority of you may not know this, but we ALL collaborate. We all talk. If there's security and safety issues we work together behind the scenes. Brad and the Ortus team can certainly corroborate. ACF has a use case that we're pretty good at: big gov + enterprise. We'd love to expand that to bring more folks in, and I'm driving that internally (we're a big ship though and change is slow in here). Meanwhile BoxLang is pushing into new paradigms in interop, multi-platform + performance. And Lucee provides an alternative to ACF where OSS is acceptable and community support works for the customer. None of us are enemies. We are competing during work hours and drinking beer & giving each other shit after hours. This is a small community, its important we all support each other as much as we can. So there you go. That's my take. Throw me to the wolves lol.

I am going to make the request on all three platforms for

cfwaffle

and whoever implements it first wins.

With BoxLang you can just write your own module. 😁

I give you all

bx-waffle

! The new official BoxLang Waffle generator https://forgebox.io/view/bx-waffle