Slashdot Mirror
Abandonware, or 'Allaire Forums Open Sourced'
For those who don't know, Forums is a package of Cold Fusion templates which runs on a web server with Cold Fusion installed. You can see an example of it at forums.allaire.com.
I've been using Cold Fusion for a few years now, and my initial reaction was, "Why bother?" Allaire released the initial version of Forums in 1996, supported it for about 20 minutes or so[1], and began the process of abandoning it in favor of developing a lucrative "enterprise computing" package. Around 1998 or so, perhaps even 1997, people started asking for it to be open-sourced. In 1998 Allaire made a few bug fixes and released version 2 of the software, and in November 1999, they announced the software would be open-sourced. And yesterday, they actually did it. Of course, all of their Forums customers decided they were abandoned a few years ago, and found another product.
Now in one sense, Forums has always been "open source". Cold Fusion templates are interpreted, not compiled (and Forums was released before Allaire added even the weak encryption for templates that they now support), so anyone with a few weeks to kill could scrutinize the code and figure out how everything worked. Of course, redistributing modified versions of the code was a no-no, and if you made any modifications to it, even bug-fixes, then you lost all support from Allaire. Just like any compiled software product. In fact, I believe changing the templates was against the old license agreement, though I don't have a copy of the old license readily available.
So basically what they've done is make it freely downloadable. The license agreement is one of those bastardized we-took-our-standard-license-and-changed-a-few-words things that very obviously originated in the mind of a lawyer used to writing proprietary software licenses. I suppose it's open, but it sure isn't friendly about being open, know what I mean? It giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other.
In any case, this is a classical example of the "abandoning a product while trying to keep our customers from feeling abandoned" open-source motivation. I'm dubious about its success, in this case or in the other cases where this is the motivation behind opening up a set of code. If Allaire had actually done this maybe three years ago, Forums would probably be a robust and stable product by now, and it would probably be driving a fair number of sales of the Cold Fusion application server. Instead, Allaire collected ($400 * #number_of_sales#) and pissed off (0.95 * #number_of_forums_customers#) by selling them a product with zero support.
Are people really going to flock to it now, spend a few hours parsing the license and trying to figure out if they can do anything useful with the code, and spontaneously develop a thriving user-group to support this thing? If Allaire can't even support it, why do they expect others to?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll be a huge success, it'll turn into a beautiful open-source product and every Cold Fusion site worldwide will want their own set of discussion groups. Or maybe it'll just turn into another ghost site, lights on, but nobody home.
The open source/free software community is likely to see a lot more of these sorts of projects in the future. When your car gets old and feeble, and you don't feel like fixing it up anymore, you can donate it to Goodwill or to your local school for their auto shop course. Or you just take the plates off and drive it down to the waterfront, roll down the windows, leave the keys in it, and walk away.
When you don't feel like supporting your old software anymore, you dub it "open source", send out a press release touting your bold move, and dump it in the software burial grounds. It's a little better than previous burial methods (which involving interring the software in Yucca Mountain, permanent disposal), but maybe not very much.
Now Emmett is a little more optimistic. He notes that if even one person does something useful with the code, it's a net gain. And I suppose he's right. But the community is going to have to learn how to deal with "open source" code that is actually just a cynical move to dump some unsupported product and talk about how you're supporting the open source world.
Emmett: I agree with you, but there's always the point that someone will probably find a good use for it, even if it's to test it once and throw it away. OOP means that talented developers are talented in the reuse of code. I mean, if only one person picks it apart, takes 200 lines of code, and uses it to build some better, more efficient system of some sort, and GPL all of it, isn't that worth it? I think so, and I think it's the 'one person, somewhere' belief that keeps everything going. If they were serious about doing something, they would have used the GPL and been done with it.
The key here is that Allaire isn't thinking 'one person, somewhere,'
they're thinking, 'good PR,' while they'll turn this into a PR
extravaganza and say they're thinking 'one person, somewhere.' I think we're on the same page when I say we're both thinking 'too little, too late.' Don't confuse clever marketing and free advertising for innovation.
[1] A slight exaggeration. I believe Allaire actually supported the product for at least a week after they rolled it out.
- Take a class in it, which will teach you syntax and not much else
- Figure it out yourself from the techniques you already know and the documentation you have
- (this is the big one) Learning how someone else did it
Way back when I was a wee tyke, when I was first getting the hang of Pascal, I would have given my left kidney to access the wealth of open source code today. Not because it's a free product, but because I could have learned things like fast hash functions and various optimizations without having to munge through the concepts myself. Something may be gained from the experience, I suppose, but the pain is considerably more than the gain.If software companies want to abandon software by making it open source, then scores of programmers in their crysalis stage are going to benefit. The customers were screwed already from the companies poor support policies, so they don't even enter into the equation.
With an eye to the future, I'd say that anything that will help people become programmers is a worthwhile endeavor. Isn't that what the geek community is about?
I wholeheartedly agree, coldfusion is far easier, but I find that it has serious maintainability issues.
Sure, you can make 'functions' by creating custom tags, but I find that most people who just pick up ColdFusion and start coding don't even know that you CAN create custom tags - so as a result, they create no functions, and maintainability quickly can become a nightmare (unless someone who actually KNOWS how to program can direct the other coders, and slap them on the hand when they don't code any damn functions)
just a personal rant about CF...I also wish there was a way to put more then one 'custom tag' in a file, so that I could group my functions, but instead - each and every function needs to be in a seperate file... and that sucks.
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
I currently use Cold Fusion at work. I may not have to for long. For months I tried to convince my boss that Linux and PHP was a much better solution than Solaris and Cold Fusion. (And *much* more cost effective.)
Then I installed RedHat 6.2 on his Sparc 2.
He has changed his mind.
Now that he has seen what it can do on his home machine, he is more than impressed. PHP runs rings are ound Cold Fusion when it comes to features and timeliness of updates. I am *still* waiting for our 4.5.1 bug fix release for Solaris. I will probably have to call them and scream until I am blue in the face to get it, even though we have a paid subscription for the software.
Linux and PHP are just a better choice all around.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The problem you get there is if you are trying not to create a DB backed web site, but instead a real web application.
The company I work for has created a program in ColdFusion to allow certain unnamed companies to exchange Purchase Orders, Quotes, and get back end access to part inventory & part information (including drawings & models), and for that, you need functions, or you have a terribly unmaintainable code base - our app has over 166 seperate 'custom tags' because when you design a web application instead of a web page, you need to start worrying about functional decomposition, coupling, code reuse, et al. And for this, ColdFusion can be really annoying. Espaically since it has SUCH a web page metaphore embedded in it, it's REALLY hard to get team members to call functions instead of just rewriting everything on each page.
ColdFusion I have finally determined is NOT a tool that should be used for business processes, complex issues, or really anything that is covered under the idea of an 'Application', instead of just making a database avalible on the web.
just my 2c
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
Back during 1996 I took a job as a web developer. The product the website was written in was ColdFusion 1.0 with some specific areas in 1.5. Coming from a programming background in C/C++ and pascal I found the shit to ColdFusion rather a pain.
Complete lack of programming structure, and the so called DBM/DBML files with their bad attempt at integration into HTML tag structures. With this language there was much that could be done and I decided to finish the site and clean things up. Part of this clean up with the installation and bug fixes for the Forums product.
The attempt was being made to use Forums to provide technical support, when they worked, for our customers. I remember recieving copies of updates and bugfixes on a semi regular basis, most of which broke something new and different each time.
After dealing with this for a short while we (ok I) decided to yank them down and re-write them because I was getting tired of users (customers) calling in and complaining about not understanding how to use forums.
I still wonder just where they got their initial design for the forums software. It would have been nice if they could have just ripped the perfectly usable and understandable system from Renegade or Maximus BBS systems. Atleast those I could very easily convice the users on how to use since it resembled the 3270 and 5250 green screens they were used to.
Also performance was horrid. On the Pentium 133, 128MB RAM (and if I remeber it cost us a few grand) with 2 4GB SCSI drives running Windows NT 3.51 (yes, real performance software I know) we could only get 1 page view every 3 - 5 seconds if someone was using the forums. After re-writing and converting/upgrading to ColdFusion 2.0 (which ran as a service instead of multi MB CGI) performance started increasing. Performance wasn't acceptable until leaving ColdFusion and another site re-write in InternetFacotry's SMX (running CommerceBuilder for the www server).
Now there is a good case for an abandond product as well. CommerceBuilder provided speed and integrated programming language, and much of what Apache and PHP on linux now provide. Too bad it too went the way of the scrap heap back in 1998.
Now merchant builder was a fun product to run, complete store with source and it was fast. It ran in code inside the server and was pretty. After the webserver war of netscape and microsoft started they became one of the casualties. Sure they ported their SMX to a IIS ISAPI module and moved merchant builder to it, which is all good, but they stoped supporting Commerce Builder.
Then Crack.Com in 99. They run out of money and "do-the-right-thing"(tm). They opensource their game with a $100,000 musical score and work on it, on their own dime, after the company ran out of money to finish it. Most famous for Abuse and getting many of us started using Linux (Mostly because slackware 2.x included Abuse and Doom), it is kind of sad to see this company go.
This pretty much shows the three basic ideas for a product when support is no longer available. Allaire drops it on the opensource people well after it could have been usefull and after alienating those long standing customers. Internet Factory in just completely dropping off the face of the planet and telling the customers to microsoft for their fix. And finally Crack.Com which gave their game away to the public domain.
I just hope Allaire in releasing this code realizes what they are doing and the PR appearnce they get from this. Not the kind bunch of every day geeks (a la Crack.Com), but the arrogance of holier-than-thou-I-got-rich-quick-and-you-didn't-m y-product-sucks-your-on-your-own-you-fix -the-problems attitude I have come to know and loath from Allaire once again.
PS. Yes I admit it, I still write applications in ColdFusion, if and only if I get hourly pay and 50% on top of that for headache medicine in order to deal with the language's lack of programming structures. (Yes I know it is starting to get some structure with the 4.x branch, but it still is no where close to speed, performance, and stability as Apache/PHP and dare I say it IIS/ASP.)
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
I never really had a problem with it, but it's a matter of style. I had to lol, I had the same problem with a few PERL packages, ended up doing the reverse in CF for a work tracking system. At the end of the day I had it talking to pagers and cutting ad-hoc graphs of response time for particular tech support people. [Jeez, they hated me for that one...] It drives C/PERL people up the wall, but it's a godsend if you have to hand off the app to a bunch of people who only know a bit of HTML. It really cuts down the phone calls.
Cold Fusion 4.0 supports Query Caching and Dynamic Page Caching for dynamic pages that don't need to be updated often. I have been programming in CF for 2 years now and enjoy its functionality and ease of development. I find it to be a very customizable and dynamic language, especially with the new functionality in CF 4.5. I have not coded much with PHP, so I can not comment on a comparison with CF at the moment, but I hope to someday master PHP as well. I recommend that you download the CFML Language Referance Guide from http://www.allaire.com/handlers/index.cfm?ID=13381 &Method=Full& Title=ColdFusion%204%2E5%20 Documentation&Cache=False
Look, I just made you read my signature.
If you are using Windows for Coldfusion you can get all sorts of extensions that make the program useful.
Most of those extentions do not exist for Solaris.
I do not intend to have to move to an unstable platform to get a few features.
Besides, PHP give me much of the functionality of Perl without having to add in the security problems of Perl.
As for the language syntax, if you have a Perl and C background, it is a no-brainer. I knwo that it is alot to ask to insist that people have a programming background to write applications. I guess that is what seperates the professional programmers from the web wannabies and Visual Basic coders.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
In the PHP FAQ, there's a section on PHP vs. Coldfusion. Also, there's a link to an article by a CF and PHP developer, making the comparison.
I found it REALLY useful.
I should also point out that while I know how to program (to an extent, anyway) I am no programmer; I don't do it for a living and never have. I have a passing familiarity with C, I know no Perl, and PHP was a dead cinch to pick up. Have you actually given it a try, or are you relying on something someone else told you? I should think anyone with even a little programming background (and since it appears you do this for a living I would hope that includes you) would find it easy.
As someone pointed out, Cold Fusion has always been an interpreted language. Therefore, giving away the source for Forums will actually generate revenue in sales of their interpreter, since you need to buy that for this for your web server, right?
So, they get to be "good guys" for giving away source to something you can't run without buying their product anyways, right?
Roy
I'm having trouble understanding this. I know that the open source community has, in the past, _begged_ and _pleaded_ for old, uninteresting software to be released to us. And now that it's actually starting to happen, it's just a PR stunt? That's the friggin' point! We've finally managed to give them enough of a good reason to actually do it. YAY.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
But seriously, the first day of that I programmed with php on my new job I was given a task for a simple admin to a web page. After looking at some example code and such, I was done within an hour. Now that's ease of use. Of course, I have a pretty solid programming background with experience in c/c++, pascal, a little asm... Just stuff I learned in college when I got my BS in Computer Science.
For someone WITHOUT a programming background it might be different, I'm not to sure since that's not me, and I simply can't relate. I suppose CF's hold your hand approach to documentation might be a little bit easier, but when I was reading CF docs for porting a few windows CF apps over to linux, I got annoyed by all that extra crap they put in the docs. They were too bad I guess, but I still prefer my php docs anyday. Oh yeah... and #php on efnet is by FAR one of the most helpful resources to those REALLY hard to figure out problems :)
---
It's rather elitist to say people who use VB or other "high level" languages are "professional programmers".
Just a little bit of background. I had a Bachelor of Arts in MIS. I graduated from college in 1992. I learned COBOL, systems analysis, SQL, and database concepts. Yet, I had trouble finding work for 4-5 years, and worked in non-programing service jobs.
I had skill, but no opening. I tried to learn C++, but found it too abstract and rather difficult.
Then in 1995, I started learning HTML. A friend of mine started a company. I learned Cold Fusion. Since that time, I've become a solid developer, working as both a implemented (creating the markup) and coder. While others who have no programming experience whatsoever may do poor things with Cold Fusion, I was able to put my training to good use.
Just because something is easier doesn't make it any less "professional". I know people with more programming experience than myself who poorly document their code, use bad HTML, and don't think about proper design and source control. Clients ask my company for solutions. I provide them.
Languages and Applications should strive to be easier to use. That was the whole point of 4GLs and AIs and other developments. I'd rather spend 8 hours a day coding than 12.
Do I admire the people with more experience and skill. Yes. But does that mean that other people with talent are "wannabees". No. Our clients are happy with the work we've done. And in the end, that's all that matters.
This is an enormous improvement over taking obsolete stuff and hiding it forever, or even worse, destroying it! That used to be the coorporate mindset, and is extremely painful for the engineers who worked so hard on the software to see their work abandoned.
Stop complaining about a good thing. Perhaps much more valuable "obsolete" stuff might be released if we show good will (Sun's NeWS was a recent example discussed here).
Long ago I wrote several programs, among them a version of Forth for OS/2 Forth/2, which was a fun project for me. It turns out several people actually started using it for real work. When I realized I wasn't going to play with it any more, I did something similar, released a new version (with the fixes I had done) with all of the source code in it, so that someone else could take up the banner, if they so intended. It was a fun project, I'm glad I helped out people, and was especially please to have a nice way to end the project. I highly recommend this approach to any of you who have a project you're done with, for whatever reason.
--Mike--
Can anyone point me to a nice, level headed comparison between PHP and Cold Fusion? Does one have a higher overhead? Does one cache database results? We're going to be choosing a web application development language at work soon, and if I can say "Well Cold Fusion is nice, but..." I'd be happier with the open source solution.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
It sounds like your "team members" are not disciplined to function as a team. There is a group of CF developers that have developed what is called the "FUSEBOX" methodology for developing CF websites. It is very popular and creates very "re-usable" modules. CF is like PHP, is like PERL, is like ASP, is like ANY OTHER programming platform. Some will like it and some will not. That's the GREAT thing about the WEB. There are so may ways to accomplish the same thing. You pick the one you like the best and you go with it. The results can be the same (if the programmer actually KNOWS what they are doing!) CF in the hands of someone like Ben Forta or Michael Dinowitz is much more powerful than CF in the hands of most of the folks posting here (myself included). It's the same for all platforms. So why BASH the product. If you like PHP, it's because you are better with it. If you like CF, it's because you're better with it!
a commercial project may have bit the financial big one but it /could/ have well written and/or still userful parts for other projects...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
And neither was Slashcode. I actually was hired by Rob way back when to slap together Slashcode for him. I still get hired for consulting. He gave me $1000 and a new Dell at the time. Had I known it would get this big I'd have asked for a chunk of the advertising revenue.
If you've ever worked at a business that purchased a commercial product to do a basic task, and found yourself in a situation where the company no longer supported it but also was unwilling to release the source code so that you could make minor modifications to "keep it alive" until you could find a suitable replacement, the idea of a company open sourcing a product instead of abandoning it makes you feel all giddy inside.
I've found myself hex editing code or writing complicated wrappers in order to support extremely minor environment changes (upgrading patchlevels of another product) that could have been changed in seconds had I the source code to rework. I can't count how many abandoned but perfectly good packages were thrown out due for Y2K because the company was unwilling to test it and we had no facilities too.
I've advised that companies who buy expensive software contracts or packaages build in an option to purchase that software source should the developer choose to abandon it.
Personally, I love the PHP documentation. It's concise and to the point--I rarely spend more than 15 seconds finding exactly the information I'm looking for, because it's so logically laid out, and if it takes any longer than that, I just grep for it.
:-)
It's not a tutorial, it's not an introduction, it's not a style guide or a talking paper clip. It tells you exactly as much as you need to know if you understand the basic idea of what server-side scripting is but never heard of PHP.
And if you've ever programmed in C, you'll find that you rarely have to look at the syntax portion of the manual at all. One read through should do the trick, once you've finished ooh-ing and aah-ing at all the high-level things you're allowed to do...
I remember demo'ing Intellidraw once, a long time ago, and making plans to purchase it - but I got distracted by Viso and Illustrator (which I currently use as a diagram tool, even though its totally yucky to do this)...
So do you know if there are any older versions of Intellidraw available anywhere, for sale even?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The Correct URL is http://www.forumspot.org
DNS generally takes about 24 hours to propagate. Or at least that's what the guys at SourceForge told me.
Will I retire or break 10K?
While I personaly agree that most OSS projects are better then their closed source counterparts, I don't see the OSS model takin over the world in it's entirety. After all, it's a classic case of good Vs evil. Without the closed source projects where would some of the challange come from for the opern source projects?
Face it, while alliar may dole out buggy software, without projects like it, some of the community just wouldn't have the drive to say, "I think I want to try and make a better version of that." I am a firm beleiver of open source and wish that I could program in any lang so that I could contribute something. But without the closed source, there is no Open Source.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
This may become a more common occurance now that "Open Source" is the buzz-word of the minute. I seem to remember reading (on /.) that Interbase was abandoned by Inprise/Borland when some of the project's key players jumped ship. I guess the difference in this case is that Interbase adds a very cool RDBMS to the open-source movement's stable of powerful RDBMS's (a stable which is pretty empty at the moment, save for PostgreSQL) while Forums (from the sounds of it) doesn't add much at all.
Now, maybe this won't mean anything, maybe it'll mean that the community of Forums will be able to still turn to people with knowledge when their program breaks, maybe it'll mean that they'll inspire a new competitor. But it means that this program, unlike so many other commercial projects, will still live, even after it meets "commercial" death.
Now if only Microsoft would open source Win 3.1; it's much cooler than win 95.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about.
I've been programming in CF and ASP for two years, and PHP for 1. They all have their pros and cons.
The more flexibility you have as a developer, the better off you are. I prefer CF because it's fast and easy to deploy. You can write 25 lines of ASP for every 1 line of CF.
It's astounding to see all the CF bashing here. My take on the bashing is this: 3/4 of the people here bashing CF have never used it.
If you use it regularly, you know it's fast, it's easy to deploy, and it gets the job done in a hurry. Can't say the same for ASP or PHP.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
HUH? I used Cold Fusion Studio (HomeSite + CF Stuff) and it doesn't put a CLOSING in it. Your 'Client' is clueless then for doing this and you sir are Just AS clueless for not realizing that the Homesite product has a completly customizable TAG library for your editing. If it ANNOYS you that much inform then that you can fix their studios so they won't put an incorrect closing tag. Maybe your Just confused about tags.
Just because ppl can program 'real' languages does not mean they can program for the web.
Depending on the license they released it under, I doubt you would want to reuse any of it. Not to mention that it's pretty old and there are lots of GPL'd equivilents (that don't use cold fusion). A quick search on freshmeat turns up 17 different web based forums and I'd bet that's only a small amount of the ones availiable.
Am I missing something? does this Allaire system have some special feature?
However, we should be happy that it's a step in the right direction. I have seen literally hundreds of posts on Slashdot expressing the desire for companies to open up products that are aging, instead of just shelving them. Here, Allaire has done this (sort of), and they're being criticized for the manner in which it was handled.
I agree that Allaire deserves some criticism for their half-hearted approach, but we should remember that they didn't have to do anything: they could have just abandoned this product. Someone there is facing in the right direction, so let's not be so hasty to beat them down for thier blunders.
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
So I like many others in my position use Cold Fusion in my office, and would like to get some momentum behind a movement to get off of Cold Fusion and onto PHP. The one problem tat I am finding is that despite their similar natures, there is almost never a comparison between the two. PHP is mostly compared to ASP, JSP & Zope, and Cold Fusion is mostly compared to ASP & other proprietary engines - but I never seem to find any information on how the two compare.
What I would really need to convince the PHBs is:
a. a comparison on how they hold up under heavy loads
b. a comparison of features
c. a comparison of how interoperable they are with other languages/toolkits
PHP looks better, but without any proof that it can hold up under the loads that cold fusion can (or beat CF) I can't get any movement.....
thanks.
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
__
Have you heard of Miva? Miva is almost exactly like CF except that instead of CF in the beginning of every tag, it uses Mv instead. I have only played around for a few hours with CF, but have spend several hundred writing and debugging Miva code.
I can tell you that after working so long with Miva, PHP begins to look bizarre and with strange syntax. It would be difficult to switch between to extensive work with both at the same time.
A big decider is what programming work you have done before. CF and Miva are easier to learn if you had little programming experience, whereas PHP looks so much like C that it is quick to pick up for experienced programmers.
The coding style for CF and Miva may not be what your'e used to, but that does not make them less functional.
I've used Cold Fusion for 3 years now, and have seen the product since 2.0. In my opinion, Cold Fusion is a lot better than PHP because of the way it works. The tag based metaphor focuses on the Output of Database information into HTML. You can just type in an SQL query and output it without having to deal with all that Command/Recordset and object crap. It's a great mix for people with moderate programing background who do not like the low level C++/Java stuff. You may have some criticism about Cold Fusion having bugs, but they make up for it in a lot more things. Cold Fusion has much easier concepts to learn and use, and while PHP may be powerful--the documentation just sucks. That is a problem. Every Open Source project I see is not geared towards training the language to people. I have been initially excited about PHP, Zope, and Perl, but I have found the documentation to be written for "the geek", while the books on Cold Fusion, both from Allaire and from Ben Forta, focus on training new people, as well as teaching advanced concepts. Only now with a few books on PHP on the market can I really start working with it. Many of us want to deal with stuff that's more or less as easy to use as a 4GL, or deal with complex configurations. I'd rather use CF's web based administrator and CFML on IIS and Windows NT than deal with PHP's INI files on a Linux box. Allaire may not follow the GPL or the Open Source Philosophy, but they are a lot better than the Microsoft path, and they are less insular.
Most businesses still cannot (and will continue to for some time) grasp the basic idea of giving something away. In their world, if you give something away, you earn no money in return. This is true. They also presume support will continue to derive the same income, as the number of users hasn't increased much over a period of N. Hence, the logical conclusion is that without that source of revenue, they need to cut back expenditures to survive. Not very optimal - they lose profits. The flipside that they don't realize is that by open sourcing something, you can decrease your maintenance costs and increase your user base (if properly executed).
Companies don't see the long-term benefit. And, to be honest, open source is risky - there is no guarantee of high market penetration, as always.. and companies do NOT like risk, especially an unknown one - and there is unsufficient data right now to make a long-term commitment for many companies.
I know everyone is now shouting "FUD! FUD!" but this is how companies think, so you'd better warm up to the idea. Open source developers for the most part aren't getting rich - Microsoft developers are. That's a pretty powerful statement. So, if you want companies to open source a live product, instead of one that is no longer generating revenue (at which point it doesn't matter much what happens to the software, so the decision to go open source is easier) maybe we should concentrate on producing some hard numbers on companies that have taken the plunge.. and what happened 5 years later.
Better URLs for information about this seems to be http://www.allaire.com/products/forums/ and http://www.forumspot.org/