CF Mumbo Jumbo

Comments

Damien

This is what I was looking for. Adobe is really trying to make more from ColdFusion in a dirty way. First the increase in license price and then this number of CPU thingy.

May 15, 2012, 12:14 PM

RogerTheGeek

I guess we should have seen this coming when they started talking about us not having to purchase licenses for development and staging servers. They just shifted the prices to the production licenses.

I assume the dev and stage licenses are free, but I have not read the EULA so I don't know if that is true.

May 15, 2012, 12:18 PM

Tim Cunningham

Roger, Development is still no charge, staging well... that depends how you define staging, you may need to pay:

1.8 “Staging Server” means a Server used to assemble, test and review new or newer versions of applications and that is used to deploy such applications over icensee’s Internal Network and only to be accessed by Authorized Users before, the applications are moved into live, stand-by production, or production environments.

May 15, 2012, 12:21 PM

Tim Cunningham

*Note: Adobe engineers told me my math was off in my interpretation of the EULA. You still have 1 license per 2 CPU's. So in my crossed out example with 2 quad cores you would only need one license, just as in CF 9

May 15, 2012, 12:29 PM

Charlie Arehart

Tim, thanks for drawing this out for folks to notice. It's indeed an important change that people will want to know about.

That said, I think your last sentence steps into hyperbole. Small companies "may" go to alternatives. But they may also just keep buying CF for the same reason they have to this point, even with alternatives available. No doubt: price may lead some to consider them more closely. But you say they "will go" to alternatives.

I suppose some may argue that I don't need to make this clarification, and that smart people will "know what you meant". But I suspect that this entry will get a lot of PR and attention, so I think this clarification deserves to be made, for whoever may need it. :-)

Yes, as you note, the bottom line is profitability. All companies are driven by it ultimately, or at least public ones who MUST be responsible to their shareholders. And another classic element of capitalism comes into play: supply and demand, and price elasticity. If this will cause demand to go down, the price will have to be reconsidered (if not CF's place within Adobe).

But before any may say this is just one more sign of pending doom for CF, let's just wait and see how things play out. I'm sure many in Adobe are hoping instead that this will lead to an ultimate increase in revenue (even if at a cost of some sales). As long as profits rise, that will be "good" for CF, even if it may seem "bad" to some.

Bottom line: either CF is worth the money to people or it's not. Let's see how the market responds.

Keep up the good work.

May 15, 2012, 12:29 PM

Charlie Arehart

As for the question of staging, we should clarify that in pointing to section 1.8, you're confirming how a staging server is defined. But section 3.2.1 clarifies that, yes, staging is still free (for licensed users).

And section 2.3 clarifies that disaster recovery instances ("hot swap", "hot backup") are also covered by one's license.

For those seeing this entry who may have missed how this change was introduced in CF9, see the "classic" encouraging entry on the topic from Adobe's Terry Ryan:

http://www.terrenceryan.com/blog/post.cfm/coldfusion-9-testing-staging-and-development-changes-to-eula

It doesn't appear that things have changed in CF10, but "I am not a lawyer" and have not compared the EULAs closely yet, myself. If anyone else might, feel free to share your observations here, as I'm sure many will be interested in the topic.

May 15, 2012, 12:33 PM

RogerTheGeek

Yeah, I am reading the EULA, but am impatient. I don't use staging myself often, but others in our data center do. I can't see the cost issue being a big deal to us, but it makes defending CF harder when they would really like to dump it.

So, the bottom line is the cost went up a bit overall. Our people won't be going to production until the first service pack comes out so I have some time to play locally.

BTW, if someone posts comments without a website entry, their name above the gravatar barely shows up on my system. Just a FYI.

May 15, 2012, 12:35 PM

Tim Cunningham

Charlie, thanks for the input.

It is easier for a "camel to get through the eye of a needle" - that is hyperbole. "Will go to alternatives" is just my educated opinion, since I feel it is a well established trend.

But thanks for point that out, others may agree that I am overstating a point. I want them to know I don't see this as doom for Adobe ColdFusion. It will be around as long as Adobe wants it to be.

May 15, 2012, 12:38 PM

Charlie Arehart

Interesting point, Tim. I'd never noticed that technically, by definition, "hyperbole" refers to the writer's intention to exaggerate a point without meaning to be taken literally. :-)

So yes, in this case, your point was not hyperbole, if you think people small business "will go to alternatives".

I'll retract my statement, your honor, and say that it's "an overstatement". I stand by that, though of course we may disagree. :-)

BTW, about Roger's comment above, I see it too. For instance, Kristof Polleunis's name appears dark gray on my monitor, so barely noticeable unless I highlight it. It seems that when one offers a URL in their comment profile, that creates a hyperlink that gets a different color. Note, as well, that the color for this non-linked name is darker than the color for the date/time shown below each comment. Seems something that should be tweaked, if it may be easy for you. As always, just trying to help.

May 15, 2012, 1:03 PM

Kristof Polleunis

You can also upgrade to Railo (http://www.getrailo.com) or Open BlueDragon (http://www.openbluedragon.org/) and be done with all that crap.

Adobe should focus on growth such practices will push people towards open source alternatives.

May 15, 2012, 1:44 PM

Dan

Anyone aware of how ColdFusion 10 Standard licensing works with Amazon EC2? Thought I remember reading that you could install Standard version on a limited number of AWS EC2 instances.

May 15, 2012, 2:10 PM

Ryan

I emailed my system admin about the release this morning. Interesting though not surprising reply similar to Roger's above. I wonder how many companies delay installing new apps until a service pack is available and if companies like Adobe take this into consideration when deciding when to release fixes (faster means potentially accelerated sales but risks scaring customers by admitting there are 'bugs' that need fixing so closely after release).

"I'd expect TSS won't approve it til end of year, but we might try to get it sometime late summer with an exception after the first hot fix if it comes out within a few months."

May 15, 2012, 2:29 PM

Steve W

This is actually a better model for corporate users (Enterprise license). Each license covers 2 CPUs (para 1.16), each processor now can have 4 cores (used to be two) and if your virtual, as long as you have license to cover your physical CPUs you can install all the virtual servers you want.

May 15, 2012, 2:42 PM

Michael Zock

It's times like these where I wonder if Adobe's PR department is actually a trial run for that old idea of an army of monkeys with a lot of typewriters.

May 15, 2012, 2:58 PM

Tim Cunningham

Roger & Charlie,

I have changed the style of the comments section, you should be able to see the names of people who do not put a URL for a blog more clearly now.

May 15, 2012, 3:39 PM

Mike Collins

My understanding of the new core languange is to deal with virtual cpus that are defined in VMWare. VMWare see cores as vcpus, which can then be subdivided into more vCPUs.

So depending on how many vCPUs you want to assign to a core you can start to get a substantial higher amount of VMs per server.

If you have 4 or less cores per pCPU the new language will have no impact.

May 15, 2012, 4:03 PM

Dave DeVol

We just bought some of those 2cpu/8core systems, but we also virtualized them. The newest hardware and virtualization has really changed things in terms of overall cost and use. For us, we are saving a lot of $. When we had the 4 core systems, we only installed 1 OS and 1 Coldfusion server on it. I now have 8 OS's on a single host, although not all running CF. Does the EULA say anything about vCPU limits? If not, with the new hardware in the market today, a small business could buy 4 licenses and install 8-16 OS's and as many CF servers on a single host if they wanted. Seems like a good deal to me.

I'm also not sure many small businesses are going to be buying that kind of hardware if the $1200 diff is a deal breaker anyway.

May 17, 2012, 11:06 AM

Joe Brislin

There was some clarification posted by the ColdFusion team today regarding the EULA changes. The changes do not appear to be as strict as once believed. I wanted to post the link here to make sure that anyone that found this post had full disclosure. http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-10-eula

May 22, 2012, 3:56 PM

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