G'day:
A few weeks back, right in the thick of the crap about all these Log4J vulnerabilities, I was talking to a few people about the necessity and the effort involved in Lucee getting their situation sorted out, vis-a-vis dealing with outdated library dependencies they had. They were lucky to be safe from the Log4J thing… but only serendipitously-so because they'd not been able to prioritise moving off a really old version of Log4J (which didn't have the problematic code in it yet). They just didn't have the resources to do anything about it, when considering all the rest of the work that kept coming in. The crux of it was that they can only afford so much paid-for dev time, which means tough decisions need to be made when it comes to deciding on what to work on.
To their credit, they've now removed the old version of Log4J from the current version of Lucee 5.x, as well as in the upcoming 6.x, replacing it with the fully-patched current version.
I had a private chat with one of the bods involved in the behind-the-curtain parts of Lucee's going on. Initially they were berating me for being unhelpful in my tone (we agreed to disagree on that one. Well: we didn't agree on anything, on that note. We just moved on), but then got to talking about what to do to sort the situation out. They explained the lack of help they were getting on the project, both in the context of volunteer devs, but as well as lack of €€€ to be able to pay the devs that dedicate their time to the project. I said "you need to get something like Patreon!", and they quickly pointed out that they'd told me about this already, and indeed included the link to it that very conversation.
https://opencollective.com/lucee.
I had only glanced at the page, and had not clocked it wasn't just some page of their own website going on about donations, and I was also completely oblivious to the fact that "Open Collective" is a thing: it is indeed a Patreon-a-like thing.
Cool. Good to know.
This also got me thinking. It sux that people are so happy to use things like Lucee for free, whilst lining their own pockets. Even worse when things don't go their own way, or they need something done, and expect it to just magically appear for them.
It also occurred to me that whilst I personally don't use Lucee to benefit me (although I indirectly do, I know), I sure work for a company that has built its software on Lucee, and is doing pretty well for itself. And I'm the one who's supposedly stewarding our development effort on Lucee, so I was being a bit of a hypocrite. I was not happy with myself about that. I needed to wait for some dust to settle at the end of the year, and then I forgot for a week, but today I bounced the idea of becoming a Lucee sponsor to my boss (the one with the cheque book), and he took zero convincing that it was the right thing to do. He was basically saying yes before I'd finished my wee speech explaining why we really ought to.
And this is the thing. Fair dos if you're just a dev working in a Lucee shop. Like me, you might think it's not on you to put money their way. Or just can't afford it (also like me). But what you could do is mention it to yer boss that it's maybe something the company could do. The bottom rung of the corporate sponsorship is only US$100/month, and whilst that's not trivia for an individual: it's nothing to a company. Even a small one. It's also a sound investment. The more contributions they get, the more time they will be able to spend making sure Lucee is stable, improving, and moving forward. It's more likely a bug that is getting in your way gets fixed (I am not suggesting anyone starts lording "I sponsor you so fix my bug" over them; I just mean there'll be more dev work done, which means more bugs will get fixed). It's actually a good and sensible investment for your company as well. And if it's a sound investment for your employers: it's a sound investment for you too, if you like to continue getting a salary, or move on to another CFML shop after yer current gig. And all you need to do is ask a question.
So: call to action. Here's what I'd like you to do. If you work in a Lucee shop and yer not already sponsoring Lucee: grab that link I posted above, and drop yer boss a line and go "hey, we get a lot of benefit from these guys and it's probably the right thing to do to chuck a bit of money their way. We won't notice it, but it'll really help them". It's easy to sign up, and it's just a zero effort question to ask.
You'll feel better about yerself if you do.
Righto.
--
Adam
