What's going on with 4CFF?

Many of you may have heard of 4CFF (The For ColdFusion Foundation) when we announced it at CFUnited last year, but haven't heard much about it since. Why?

First, if you haven't heard of 4CFF. Check out our site at 4cff.org. The short description is that many of us believe there needs to be a neutral, non-profit, entity that can foster, sponsor, and "own" important projects to the ColdFusion Community, to ensure that those projects are always for the benefit of the CF Community. In a sense, we are shooting for an National Endowment for the Arts model... or in the software world, perhaps the Apache Software Foundation model.

Anyhow, back to the question, what is going on with 4CFF? Well, many things actually, but not enough. First, we have been spending time figuring out what we really want the foundation to do. We are all busy people, so just adding more work to the work we all already have was not very feasible. So, we have decided on how we can support projects in a way that is easy to manage. We have been talking about which projects to support, and we have a few that are interested in becoming part of 4CFF and we are interested in them becoming a 4CFF project... but then something seems to get in the way:

• what is the true value of being a 4CFF project?
• what do we do about copyright ownership?
• or in one case How much money are you going to give me for my project to be owned by 4CFF?

These have been somewhat tough questions to answer, and in my opinion it comes down to one simple answer: money.

I don't mean that in a negative sense, the truth is that the world we live in operates on money. So, we have switched our focus temporarily to getting our 501(c)3 status. What is that? That is the thing that says the IRS agrees that what we are doing is for the benefit of a community of people and not just for our own benefit. By recognizing that, it allows donations to be tax deductible, which means your money is even more meaningfully applied. The Foundation gets more money, you get a tax break, it is a win-win.

Recently, we have been working with lawyers to apply for 501(c)3 status. My hope is that if we can get the organization to be officialy recognized as a tax exempt non-profit, then people and corporations are more likely to open up their checkbooks. Corporations and individuals that use these projects will have a vested interest in donating, to ensure that they will have even better software in the future. And once we have some money, we'll be able to make useful grants to projects, and once we have projects we will have more people interested in volunteering and something useful for them to volunteer to... then we keep repeating so that we have spectacular software that is for the CF community, and owned and supported by the community. It is a feedback loop and we just need to figure out how to get it started.

I want to be clear, everyone participating in 4CFF is doing it in a strictly volunteer basis. The ColdFusion world has already changed my life, I want to give back and I want to help make our community stronger. I know the other volunteers to 4CFF feel the same way. Those people are (in alphabetical order): Ray Camden, Sean Corfield, Sam Farmer, Rachel Lehman, Doug Morrison, Jared Rypka-Hauer, Chris Scott, Dan Wilson, and John Zhu. Thank you guys for volunteering your time.

So, what are we doing? Still trying to get through the early stages of starting a new venture. Should we be further along? Yep. Why aren't we further along? A good number of reasons, but lack of dedication isn't one of them.

Can we get to the next level? I hope so. Am I a dreamer? You tell me. :)

We'll keep pushing for the dream and hope it comes true,
Jason