OK so I'm going to cover all the things here one by one, because there's a lot to cover. Just for my own sanity (and so Adam doesn't yell at me) I'm going to thread it.

Great replies @Mark Takata (Adobe)! 👍 ❤️

6. isn't very meaningful without knowing how many busses y'all used to fill, not that that is necessarily a good indicator of anything. 7. -- our perspective is that Adobe cares about the CF community (e.g. sponsoring conferences other than their own; keeping their own very affordable, both really nice things) but isn't even bothering to make a business case for former customers like us that jumped ship for Lucee because we'd be paying $10-$20k a year for enterprise licensing whose exact terms remain a bit befuddling and whose value proposition has not been articulated. Having said that, it was a different time when we switched (2018) and at the time there wasn't even a Mark around to wave to us as we left, and I'd like to think that if the same departure were going on today, he'd have the decency to hex us on our way out. 🙂

sponsoring conferences other than their own

FWIW, Adobe just agreed to be a Platinum sponsor for Into The Box this year.

hence my comment! that's awesome

"faded cement pool deck beige" sponsor

OMG lol

there's vicious circle of "we cannot find CF developers, so new project will be done in X" and "I cannot find any work in CF anymore so I switched to X". I'm sure Adobe is doing something about that 🙂

Working on it! Hope to have a full house at CFSummit2022 Certification event on October 5th. Certifying CF devs helps keep the ecosystem strong. Also free full day trainings happening basically every month, plus webinars. More to do!

I've heard the sentiment in 2. a lot over the years and I think it generally comes down to smaller companies and solo devs/consultants, for whom the licensing costs seem to be running away from them, and Adobe seemingly focusing on the larger, higher-paying customers. At the lower end of the market, choosing a commercial product when you're up against a lot of free, open-source alternatives is hard decision to justify to the folks with the purse strings. As you move further up the market, even if you pick a FOSS product, the likelihood is greater that you'll want paid services and support to accompany it -- and therefore choosing a commercial product and support is a much more reasonable and much easier decision to justify. I don't know what segment @Gareth is in but I suspect the former, based on his comments?

Sean, you're absolutely not wrong. I come from the space of the "little guys" myself. I never worked for a huge corp. The closest was working for Universities, which don't exactly shower their departments with huge budgets to buy CF (educational discount or not). One of the constant stories I've been speaking to internally is the need for more gradient solutions. ACF is never going to be free, but the jumps in price are pain points for customers. Our license model is, at its core, needlessly confusing in my opinion. That was my opinion long before I joined Adobe, and it is my opinion now. I've made that clear internally. Unraveling that is a herculean task, but one I continue to grind away at. I hope eventually we will see changes for the better, but they won't come tomorrow. Bottom line is, as an evangelist, that is far outside my wheelhouse and influence. All I can continue to do is speak with the voice of the customer internally, try to influence leadership to simplify and align our models with other modern models, and not give up.

Yeah, I think the pricing/licensing model for ColdFusion has gotten slowly worse and much more complex over the years, and even Standard edition priced itself out of a lot of people's hands ages ago -- but I see Lucee as a win for CFML overall in that space since folks can still have a free (or "cheap") CFML setup for the low end and Adobe's full backing for enterprise at the high end -- so we can keep more people in the community. But Lucee really doesn't provide anything in terms of useful support or backing -- compared to what a company like Adobe can provide. For us, at work, the cost of continuing with ACF Enterprise just wasn't realistic for a small company: when I joined in '09, we had ACF8 Enterprise in production and we evaluated ACF9, but ultimately switched to Railo -- at the same time we also switched from MS SQL Server and Windows to MySQL and Linux -- mainly because of licensing costs -- and we've since shed other commercial software to reduce licensing costs. These aren't easy decisions and there are always trade offs.

On the one hand, it's herculean, but on the other hand, it's not like there aren't dozens of examples of products with 'starter' or 'small shop' tiers for their products.

That's the only reason I am managing to get traction. But I'm an evangelist, not a business guy. Not a sales guy. Not a VP of marketing. So I'm trying to do a hill climb with a 2cylinder engine lol.

I feel like the Adobe ColdFusion team should listen a lot more to any feedback from you, especially considering it seems no one else is really listening

my read of what Mark is saying is that they listen to feedback primarily from their bigger Enterprise customers, who (no surprise) are not generally here on Slack, where the smaller shops/freelancer demographic is better represented

I do appreciate Mark being here

I want to see the official Adobe job posting for his job. 'what we're going to do is: place a bunch of land mines / grenades all around our product, none of which will be your fault, and all of which you will see from miles away, and then, when our customers / people in the community get near them, we need you to throw yourself on them as though you had personally put them in the customers' path, despite your memo from Thursday last suggesting that wouldn't all of this be so much easier without any grenades'

I just feel like the pricing and business relationships mean that a shift for anyone not willing to pay the big $$$, is inevitable

So, I knew what I was getting myself into, let's just put it that way. I've been a CF dev and a part of the community for years. And when the position was put in place, they made it work in a way where I CAN be brave about speaking out. And, I should emphasize, they DO listen to me. 100%. Anything and everything that is coming out in the next release has some fingerprints of mine, I'm deeply involved in helping to make things happen. But, you know, trying to manage expectations lol. I'm one dude, and while I'm devastatingly handsome (or so my mom keeps telling me) there is only so much I can accomplish at a time. And all of you are very supportive of me, for which I am eternally grateful. The job is stressful at times, but I wouldn't want to work anywhere else doing anything else.

but I wouldn't want to work anywhere else doing anything else.

exception; array out of bounds

DAMN IT. I thought I put the QoQ hotfix in!

As someone who was offered both the evangelist and the product manager roles after Adobe acquired Macromedia, I can only say that I am very impressed with the way Mark operates and I have a lot of insight into what it takes for him to do this job 🙂

Thank you Sean, I really appreciate it. 🙂

Sorry for being late to reply, unfortunate events required both my time and my energy... @Mark Takata (Adobe) First, let me say that I am absolutely impressed about the way you do your job and the passion you put in! I do indeed see this as a step in the right direction from Adobe!!

"CF is not going to support MongoDB" -- this is an idiotic thing for someone at Adobe to say, given how often Adobe promote the Java interop in CF and how CF can leverage any Java libraries available to the Enterprise -- which obviously includes the MongoDB drivers which are freely available as JAR files you can just drop into CF and use pretty easily!