The EU hasn’t firmly suggested mandating open source, but its plausible that it could. The recent shift at the Whitehouse, and the financial crisis hurting taxpayers (and therefore government budgets), provides ample reasons why Open Source will be one of the first cost-improvement.
I was drawn to this topic by a post on the Open Blue Dragon google groups. People are actively talking about mandated open-source.
How would this leave Coldfusion? I think, pretty well.
Much of the EU, national, regional, local governments and quangos use ColdFusion. For governments, and pan-european institutions having competitive open-source, enterprise, rapid application development frameworks is ideal. Already having the developer resources in place makes it almost a fait accompli. The more people who use open-source, the better it gets. I hope that these organisations use their Smarticles, and start to switch to open-platforms like ColdFusion.
There is choice in which provider of open-source coldfusion you want. Would you like the super-fast Railo option, or would you like the Myspace supporting OpenBlueDragon*. You can’t say that about PHP or .net can you? The CFML advisory committee allow for open-standardisation. (if you can’t decide between the open-source options you could always see which is the superior google-fighter). Smarticles preference is for Railo, it’s Swiss, as we’re in Belgian chocolate country; there’s a community in chocolate thing going on.
Don’t forget Adobe. Rationally, it has never been pushed by a sensible economic argument to go open-source with ColdFusion, but if big-business, or government, started switching, so might they. Adobe have been pretty pleasant with open-sourcing in the past. Microsoft, the most ardent Open-Source haters, have opened a (half hearted) open source foundation. Adobe have open-sourced some pretty cool things – although not Photoshop, or Coldfusion (misers 
).
As for tools, most of the frameworks, and tools are supported by the trio.
As most of the servers are Unix (or derivatives) with J2EE engines, the underlying architectures will need little change.
Within councils, and governments I am starting to see real appetite for open-source. The advantage for them is that they aren’t blind-sided by changes or dumping of product. The crisis has also made large-international organisations a little more fiscally conservative when it comes to expensive software projects. They can pay for what they use. They can even improve the layer beneath, which for a massive organisation could be a bonanza.
Personally I think that the likely shift will be toward a greater shift toward Open Source, which wouldn’t hurt Java, or ColdFusion. I can imagine .net being left out in the cold, unless Microsoft do one of their unique powerplays.
It’s a great time to be a ColdFusion developer in Europe.
Joel
* I know .net…
