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A topical issue at the moment – Adobe’s lack of support for ColdFusion builder on a platform that isn’t proprietary(Windows, OSX) is something that is very close to my heart.

In my previous life as a PHP and Perl developer I lived breathed and slept on Linux platforms. RedHat rocked the production servers, Ubuntu hummed away on the workstations and there was even some weirdo in the corner running Slackware and mumbling to himself. I loved the power and freedom that it gave me as a developer having my own development environment surrounding me. Development of DSLs and macros was quick and easy and life was pretty dammed cool!

In Chapter 3 of the awesome “The Pragmatic Programmer” Mssrs Hunt and Thomas devote an entire section to the discussion of why developers should have access to a good shell and the other tools that a Linux development environment brings to the party. I embraced this approach whole heartedly and like to think I was the better developer for it.

Moving on to ColdFusion I joined a company to whom Linux was a scary word used by bearded goblins in the far off foggy mountains of CLI land. I’ve since introduced them to the power of Linux in a development house (for all sorts from running source control software up to simple DNS lookups and diagnostics that you simply cannot do on Windows without installing yet another piece of Software).

And yet I’m denied the ability to set up my development nirvana by Adobe’s rather puzzling refusal to support Linux as a platform to run CFBuilder. It’s not a technical issue that I can see, the beta’s could be coaxed into life on the distro of your choice, the base is already a cross platform IDE, and as far as I can gather it’s an issue with the licensing aspect of the software that is preventing it from running on anything other than Windows / OSX.

There is a bug filed in the Adobe Bug tracker to address this issue but I don’t think that simple Yes votes are sufficient in this instance, the community needs to explain to Adobe exactly why we are asking for support on this platform:

1. Linux is a brilliant platform for development – not directly relevant but as previously stated, Linux is a rich and functional OS to write software on.
2. CFBuilder is a development tool – I can understand that Adobe will not be porting Photoshop to Fedora any time soon and the majority of their products are probably rightly bound to the Windows and OSX platforms… but the majority of their products are not for developers! Devs have different needs to designers (web or otherwise).
3. Linux users are natural hackers – not evil cyber criminals but rather intelligent users that are used to tweaking and customising their OS, their work flows and their environments. Supporting CFBuilder on Linux would likely lead to some amazing extensions being developed and creative integrations with other projects to improve ColdFusion and ColdFusion development for every one in the community.
4. ColdFusion runs on Linux – the application stack already runs on all 3 platforms so Adobe clearly recognise the market for Linux Hosted ColdFusion – surely it’s not that great a stretch to see the benefit of Linux Developed ColdFusion?
5. You only need to rewrite one part of the IDE – I’m not an Adobe employee but as I understand it the only aspect of CFBuilder that won’t run on Linux is the licensing module. Surely this can be retooled without too much effort?
6. The market supports “openness” – not freedom but openness and choice are big business right now. Just look at the inroads Android is making into Apple’s territory by opening up their development tools to everyone.

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Of course there is always the question of cost and money when you mention Linux. I don’t see why this always seems to be raised as a negative (perhaps something to do with the slavering devotion of the FSF to the platform) but I have no problem paying for Software to run on Linux. Hell I had no problem recommending commercially supported distros.

But part of me thinks that making this a commercial choice is the wrong move. Freeing up the installation platform for CFBuilder benefits the entire community and those that support this concept should be able to vote up the bug.

Don’t expect Linux support to == free CFBuilder but do vote up the bug if you support those of us who are happy to pay for the software but would like to install it on the platform of our choosing!

what are you waiting for? GO VOTE!