Alan,
I am responding to your recent post and attempt to introduce yourself to the CFML community. I think it's a good start but I think it's still lacking and you've not addressed the most pressing matters adequately.
I've been a long time advocate of New Atlanta and BlueDragon. In fact, I was one of the original Team BlueDragon members and had frequent chats w/ Vince about BD. I've even openly come down on Macromedia and Adobe for what I considered poor stewardship of the ColdFusion application server.
With that said, the issues that you and the OpenBD project are experiencing are directly correlated to recent comments that were posted by Sean Corfield outlining your supposed views of the ColdFusion community.
To quote from Sean's blog, he asserts that these are your feelings:
“He's “sick and tired of hearing about the 'CF community'”. He feels the “so called 'rock stars' within the CF community are just a lot of empty vessels”.”
Now in reading this, I look at it as either something you said was taken out of context or these are your true feelings about developers who have been using ColdFusion-based technology and have invested time and effort in promoting the technology. Just to be clear, Adobe ColdFusion developers are the predominant users of the CFML language and while BD & Railo developers developers also enjoy the language, Adobe ColdFusion developers make up the majority.
I am truly hoping that your comments were taken out of context because it would be hard for me to understand how someone who admittedly has such a massive disconnect from the CFML community would call the top talent in the ColdFusion community “empty vessels”. After 10 years as a member of the CF community, I consider myself in this top tier and I wouldn't call myself an “empty vessel”.
Your post has done nothing to address these assertions and while I can understand you've been disconnected from the CF/CFML community, I believe that until you've properly addressed those comments, the OpenBD project will continue to have a black eye.
So for the sake of the volunteers that are so committed to the OpenBD effort, please provide an adequate explanation of the comments posted by Sean. They were supposedly made in the OpenBD private mailing list so at the moment we're all going on hearsay, albeit hearsay from one of the top talents and most reputable people in the CFML community. Brushing it off as not fitting your personality or attitude isn't a sufficient answer.
To the OpenBD Steering Committee, I would urge you to once again press this issue with Alan and ensure proper transparency.
