Looking ahead 12months, what needs to happen before we can claim Open BD a success?
I think there are multiple criterion for success and we'll discover new criteria as we move forward with this project. At this point I see our first major milestone as being a successful point, or version, release that incorporates functionality suggested by the community, voted on by the committee, executed by New Atlanta (or others), and verified/accepted by the community. In order for us to claim success I think we also need to see company adoption of Open BlueDragon, and contributions to the project from the community. Not really even code contributions but help with documentation, tutorials and evangelizing the product. Nothing less than world domination really.
I have to say after rereading my success criteria I was pretty aggressive with what needed to be accomplished. I knew who was involved though and I have to say we have been a success! We have now had 3 successful releases (1 major 2 minor), including an awesome admin console built from the ground up. We have had functionality voted on/brought up by the community (some not from the ColdFusion community either might I add!) and subsequently added to the engine. New Atlanta (while never releasing the admin which I had originally hoped they would) has been active in contributions as has Alan and Andy (not part of New Atlanta). Lastly but certainly not least we have had an amazing community the google groups are active with questions, discussions, help and advice. We have a wiki that the community has helped publish content, and we have had multiple bugs submitted to us.
I think this year we could stand to get better organized, offer a better/clearer road map and communicate what we are thinking about working on next. This is a challenge because we have super intelligent guys working on this project and sometimes when they get an idea BOOM its done before we have time to talk about. Also I think something I didn't say but the intent was there is we should (and do) need to have a big focus on growing the CFML community. We'll probably never (as the small group of folks that we are with just enough scratch to buy some stickers for all 4 of our fans at cfObjective ;) ) grow the community 200k+ in 1 year like Adobe but I'd like to think we can contribute to growth as well. Are some of the folks using OpenBD as an alternative to ColdFusion, yeah sure it is going to happen. What I'd really like to do is for every 1 person we get from inside the community I'd love to add 2 from outside the community. That is a lofty goal, and quite honestly I don't see us fulfilling it. If I set our expectations high maybe we can achieve a more realistic goal: grow the CFML community not just the OpenBD community.
That being said if you are at cfObjective and you have played with OpenBD and/or are using it find me or Matt Woodward and ask us for stickers we got 'em and I know we'd both love to hear success stories, and pains.
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