David Aden has written a really good article for Government Technology entitled Open Source -- Is it Free?. This is not a technical article, rather it focuses on business decisions, and measuring the true cost of "free". David presents the arguments clearly and fairly, and this one is worth the read.
Whether you like it or not, the real benefit of open source is the size of the developer community. This promotes the use of the technology. PHP isn't great, but the immense size of the developer community means that employers have a better resource to call upon. It also vitally means developers have a huge coding resource to call upon. CF as a technology is limited by the size of the developer community.
An obvious example of where Adobe did do it right is Flex and this is reflected in the available developer community.
Adam
--- Ben
I wasn't trying to say you did or did not agree. Basically he is saying that no matter what technology you choose, you will need good people that understand that technology. The problem is with CF you have a small pool of people to hire from. I was just discussing this point :)
Thankfully Flex doesn't have this issue and is already being demonstrated in the job market. Well done Adobe!
(Can I switch this into a "make CF free" and charge for the dev tools post?)
--- Ben