Community Support?

The Developers' Conference that just passed started with a rather strange introduction. A speaker extolled the praises of Macromedia's support for the community. He first asked all members of Team Macromedia to stand and four people did. Why four? Because Team Allaire wasn't there. Around the time of the merger, Team Allaire was destroyed, and because of the way it was done, many of the members have very bad feelings about it -- so bad that some have even dropped out of ColdFusion altogether.

But there were a few in Team Allaire who were asked to come over to Team Macromedia. Two such people were present and they stood, but why weren't the rest present? It might have something to do with the fact that Team Macromedia people were given free passes to the conference on a case-by-case basis. If you weren't invited then you had to pay to be present.

The speaker then went on to ask the user group managers to stand for a round of applause. I agree that these people put a lot of time and effort into the community. They deserve the applause.

The final group called to stand was an interesting one. It was actually three groups all together. They could not be called separately because it would have shown how much of Macromedia's statement about community support was a farce. The groups was made up of:

• List Managers
• Resource Sites
• Authors

Now let's be honest. There are basically two types of lists around. The first is the many and various run by House of Fusion and the second is the one run by CFDJ to 'allow people to speak to the authors'. CFDJ was a sponsor of the Conference and could have stood. On the other hand, no one from House of Fusion could. No one from House of Fusion was there.

When we move to the resource site managers, no one from House of Fusion was there for that either. Neither were people from Defusion, CFVault and many other sites. The fact that many of these sites are run by former Team Allaire members might be a small reason. The fact that some of the developer sites have closed down may be another.

The author group at least had some people there. And some of the authors even came over to the Community Suite to talk about their books as well as help raffle them off. On the other hand, some just couldn't.

Does all this make a mockery of Macromedia's statement about community support? Maybe and maybe not. Macromedia seems to have no problem supporting community related events and resources that they have control over. There was actually a lot more going on at the conference that spoke against their support of an open community, but that's for another time.

• Subscribe
• RSS

• Editorial
• Specials
• Community
• News
• Tech and Tags
• Views
• Reviews
• Techniques
• Security
• Best of ColdFusion Talk
• Knowledge Base
• Blog Watch

• Tipical Charlie