A foundation for Zope [LWN.net]

Back in 1998, LWN got one of its first scoops by reporting that a company called Digital Creations was planning to release its well-respected Principia product under an open source license. Even more interestingly, this release had been advocated by the company's venture capital backers. Over the years, both the software and the company were renamed "Zope," and the Zope platform has been used for many applications, including the popular Plone framework.

Zope Corporation has, throughout, retained copyrights for - and control over - the Zope platform. Recently, however, the company announced that a foundation would be created for Zope. This foundation will be given the copyrights to the code and the right to the Zope trademark; its task will be to ensure the future success of Zope independently from Zope Corporation. We talked briefly with Zope Corp. head Rob Page about this change.

Why have you decided to make this move at this time?

The global potential for Zope 3 is huge. The design principles in Zope 3 make it the perfect platform for "Web 3.0" development. By way of example, we (Zope Corporation) are developing a large document management project for the US Department of Defense on Zope 3, and Mark Shuttleworth is working to bring SchoolTool/SchoolBell to the world -- all on top of Zope 3.

Everyone with a vested interest in Zope benefits from its widespread adoption and deployment. Users benefit from the support network and commercial organizations benefit from more platform-based opportunity. We believe the explicit vendor neutrality of a Foundation will accelerate the adoption of Zope (version 2 *and* version 3).

Bottom line: We want to remove any objections to adopting Zope, and we see the Zope Foundation as the last step.

Were there any particular problems or pressures which led to the creation of the foundation?

No. A confluence of events -- the availability of Zope 3.1 (whose release is imminent), the release of SchoolTool, our imminent completion of our large DoD project and the community's launch of a Zope 3 ECM (Enterprise Content Management) project made this an excellent time to launch the Foundation.

That said, members in the Zope community have been discussing a Foundation for more than a year and we take it at face value that a Foundation would help them sell more Zope-based products and services to their prospective and current customers.

How many engineers do you have working on Zope now? Do you expect that to change as Zope moves over to the foundation?

From November 2001 through November 2004 our Chief Technology Officer, Jim Fulton worked on little other than Zope 3. Typically, at least 2 additional Zope Corporation engineers spent 80% of their time throughout that period working on Zope 3 work as well.

He was assisted by the incredible efforts of some really smart people. At the risk of insult by omission, it's appropriate to specifically mention and appreciate the efforts of Steven Alexander, Stephan Richter, and Philipp von Weitershausen.

Since October of 2004 we have had more than 4 full-time engineers working on the above-mentioned Zope 3 based Document Management project. We have already contributed large amounts of code into Zope 3 (XPDL support is one specific example). We intend to release additional significant contributions into both Zope 3 and the upcoming Zope 3 Enterprise Content Management project.

Of course, everyone here works on Zope. :^) Most developers are working on the delivery of our products into specific customer environments. This involves installation, custom development, configuration and transition to internal operations. We don't expect that to change.

What sort of governance structure do you see for the foundation?

The governance structure of the foundation will be developed by taking the best ideas from the likes of the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation and others. Since it's early we haven't drawn any specific conclusions. We intend to work these issues out during the summer and launch the foundation by October 2005.

Will Zope Corp. retain any sort of veto power over changes it doesn't like?

Zope Corporation won't have a veto per se. Some changes (e.g., changing Zope's license) will require a unanimous vote of the Board of Directors.

How will you ensure that the development of Zope continues to meet your business needs?

In an open source world we can't ensure_ anything. :^)

What we can do is continue to demonstrate productive leadership and contribute great software and ideas. The Zope community is distinguished by having gathered some really smart people so we're extremely optimistic about the Foundation's success.

How will the foundation be funded?

We will be recruiting a few start-up partners to fund the initial formation and operation of the Foundation.

The Foundation will have a dues structure that will support ongoing operations.

What's the status of Zope 3? There does not appear to have been a Zope X3 release since last November; has development stalled?

There hasn't been a tagged release of Zope 3 since last November, though by the time I send this (or the time it's published) Zope 3.1 will be out.

Development has done anything but stall. The last seven months have been spent fixing bugs, refactoring implementations and polishing interfaces. We have a large customer to thank for providing the real-world application to thoroughly exercise Zope 3.

A lot of community work has gone into Zope 2.8 and a project called "Five" (Zope 2 + Zope 3 = Five ;-) - these are Zope 2 focused projects which aim to bridge the gap between Zope 2 and Zope 3 architectures. Zope 2.8, which now includes Five in the distribution, was released officially on June 11th, 2005.

How's business? Is the services model working for you?

Depends on what you mean by services.. :^)

Since 2001 we have been de-emphasizing our professional services capacity in favor of a more productized delivery model.

Our product business -- specifically the delivery of our products through managed hosting (aka ASP/Software as a Service) has been extremely successful. We recently announced the addition of CNHI as a managed hosting customer. CNHI will be launching 133 newspapers on our Zope4Media product.

Our managed hosting offering provides our customers with a managed/guaranteed environment in which they can assemble composite applications (i.e., applications built from Zope, Squid, LAMP, etc.), without assuming the operational responsibilities.

We thank Mr. Page for taking the time to answer our questions.

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Linguistic assault

Posted Jun 21, 2005 3:00 UTC (Tue) by amazingblair (subscriber, #2789) [Link]

Hi Nettings,

I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who cringed at the CorporateSpeak used by Zope's Rob Paige. It's a shame that many company and government employees feel that unless they use arcane gobbledygook (as opposed to plain English), what they do will not sound important enough to justify their existence, jobwise.

CorporateSpeak:
"Since 2001, we have been de-emphasizing our professional services capacity in favor of a more productized delivery model."

Plain English equivalent:
"Since 2001, we have been marketing services less and products more."

Oh, and Nettings, while we're on the subject of clear and plain communication: What does the NOI mean that you used in your comment? "Not Overly Interested"? It's got to be one of those email-style abbreviations such as BTW (By The Way), LOL (Laughing Out Loud), etc. (et cetera) But I'm not familiar with it. For an old Economics major like me, NOI means "Net Operating Income"!

-Amazing Blair

Linguistic assault

Posted Jun 21, 2005 5:48 UTC (Tue) by nettings (subscriber, #429) [Link]

:) Woops, sorry. What I meant to say is "no offense intended".