Knowledge@Wharton scored an interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. I think there’s a lot of great content in the article. The article is mostly concerned with Air, but the part I liked best is where the interviewer asks the question I’ve been wondering about for awhile chiefly:
Knowledge@Wharton: The AIR run time is available as a free download. The AIR Software Development Kit is available for free. How does Adobe make any money from this technology?
Kevin goes on to answer, read the whole article for his exact answer, but basically it comes down to the fact that Adobe uses it’s free products as a loss leader to encourage purchases of their other technologies including tooling and servers. He specifically includes ColdFusion in that.
I think this is another pointer to the fact that Adobe probably won’t be open sourcing or making free ColdFusion anytime in the near future. That might change if OpenBD and Railo gain any sort of traction. But I’m betting against them, as I have said before.
I was never very interested in oBD, but Railo with the JBoss integration is going to be very different. I think that could have a real impact on the CF ecosystem.
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Would be nice one day if all Adobe products became open sourced back in the day i hoped Google would buy Macromedia and give everything away but Adobe got them first.
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