Wednesday, 18 September 2013

Follow up to "Preventing Adobe from messing with ColdFusion community projects" & the CFHour Podcast reference to same

Just a quick copy and paste job today. I put this on the comments @ CFHour because it was in direct relation to their coverage of my earlier article "Preventing Adobe from messing with ColdFusion community projects".

My comment was thus:

G'day chaps
Hey, I realise my headline was perhaps slightly inflammatory, but that was just a hook to get people to go "WTF is he on about now?" as are a lot of my "headlines". If you actually *read* what I say about "blame" it was just a reaction to what Ray said, and I wasn't really making too much of a thing out of blaming Adobe for anything.

Ray said "not Adobe's fault that it happened", and my point was that [action X] happened. This impacted [thing Y]. [action X] was due to an action on the part of [entity Z]. That being the case, the way that [thing Y] was impacted by [action X] is the fault of [entity Z], because [Entity Z]'s action caused the problem. Something happened due to Adobe's actions: it's their fault. I didn't suggest they did it wittingly or maliciously, but they *did* do something that caused other people problems.

I did not mean they should not do what they did. I did not mean that relying on the stability of a third party system that makes no promises about stability is not foolhardy.  I was speaking more philosophically than anything else.

And *all* I said on the topic was "Ray's response [...] is a bit unhelpfully dismissive here". Going to to qualify that I thought that was unusual. I said this because he was simply saying "well you shouldn't do that", but the unfortunate truth is there's no other choice *but* to do it that way given the options available. So simply saying ppl shouldn't do it is... *unhelpful*. I'm sure if there were other options, then the ppl would have taken them. For the very reasons Ray cited.

What I might have expected from Adobe was a "oh shit! Sorry about that :-S didn't realise you were doing that [etc]".

Also you seemed to focus a bit too much on what you're inferring I meant (which given the way you reacted, was pretty much a misreading of what I did actually write), without really focusing on what I'd prefer you to have picked up on which is a suggested project to get all the docs onto neutral ground and offer it as an API for all and sundry to use / maintain.  Which I thought was a good result to come from all this? Maybe not. A couple of people have been keen about it anyhow.

Still: no harm done. Good podcast all round.
Anyway... I do get where they were coming from, but I think it was based on an interpretation of things that has been unreasonably conflated, IMO.

I do also think there's a pleasing bit of irony that these third-party ColdFusion documentation projects only exist due to perceived (validly so, historically) shortcomings in Adobe's offering, and then they are undone by... the very thing they're trying to fix. That it happened is not pleasing. But the irony is.

If you haven't listened to the podcast, get over there and do so!