Red5, OpenLaszlo, ColdFusion, OpenVZ, Joomla

As an "old" ColdFusion developer the year 2008 got me quite excited, or....maybe not? Two ColdFusion-server vendors have announced to go open source with their server technologies.

In March BlueDragon (http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/open_source/announcement.cfm) made this announcement at CFUnited Europe. And last week Railo Technologies did the same at Scotch on the Rocks (http://www.railo-technologies.com/en/index.cfm?treeID=357).
(There is also Smith a "native" open source ColdFusion engine.)

To be honest with you I was thinking this: "Hmmmm....that's interesting... What's happening here? What's the big picture?".

I think because the original ColdFusion engine - from Allaire, later Macromedia, and currently Adobe - stayed closed source it couldn't compete against languages like PHP. Almost all Linux distros ship Apache and PHP nowadays.

Because ColdFusion is or became a 'niche language' its competitors like BlueDragon and Railo were serving niche-niche markets.

Open Source is evolving
In my opinion Open Source (OS) is evolving and a serious competitor for close source vendors. First OS was used for the basics like the Linux Operating System. Soon serversoftware like webservers and database servers popped up. As serversoftware matured and gain popularity the next step became end-user software like Open Office and standard Web applications.
Many of these Web applications are written in PHP/MySQL: osCommerce, phpBB, Drupal, Mediawiki, WordPress and Joomla...to name a few.
These Web applications got well adopted and matured also. Now ask yourself this question: "Why aren't there any well known killer apps written in ColdFusion?"

ColdFusion today
And what about ColdFusion today? Well it stays as "the quickest language to build *tailored* webapplications". It's great to use in enterprise environments for large custom made web solutions.
A great place to find open source ColdFusion applications is on http://www.riaforge.org but most of them are "building blocks". There are also complete Web applications like BlogCFC but why should you install it....?
Well, what about: "We are hardcore ColdFusion developers and won't drop it until we're forced to do it"? Or: "We don't install Wordpress because we've got our very own ColdFusion clone"

ColdFusion against the world
I think BlueDragon and Railo know their ColdFusion engines can't compete against other languages. They also know that Adobe is "in charge" of developing new versions of the ColdFusion markup language (CFML). And customers using CFML simply want to be "Adobe-CFML compliant".
Lastly CFML is serving a niche market, so BlueDragon and Railo are serving even a smaller part of that market.

Dragons need to eat too
Having that said I think BlueDragon and Railo will earn some money on for giving support and consultancy. Maybe their technologies can become part of bigger server software like Tomcat.
In my opinion Adobe will spend more time on Flex technology. Maybe the next version of ColdFusion (version 9) is going in this "Flex" direction.

Jerry Springer could have concluded...
Open source ColdFusion is great for the community but it's to late to become a real competitor. Use ColdFusion in specific situations and not because you're a ColdFusion developer.