[Zope] Re: Zope Foundation?
Godefroid Chapelle wrote: Hadar Pedhazur wrote: > Godefroid Chapelle wrote: > >> Can the name of people that are part of this small committee be >> published ? I'd like to know who might be representing me, this way I >> can ask him or them about the direction taken and maybe actually give >> them my opinion. > > > I don't think this should be a problem, but I'll have to check with Rob > first, and then the people on the committee, to make sure they don't > mind being contacted. After all, they are "volunteering" their time, and > they might not want the extra burden of communicating with many > individuals. > > Still, this is a good idea, so I will float it early next week. Has there been any steps made about this ? Yes. We have heard from all but one person on the committee, and they have said yes. We'll try to track the last person down over the weekend, and publish the names on Monday (we'll likely publish the rest without this one person if we can't track him down). ___ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
[Zope] Re: Zope Foundation?
Matt Hamilton wrote: Hadar, These are serious claims. I talked to Paul who looked into it and gave me the following information. Note that, since the negotiations are finished and the terms are agreed to, we can talk about this with whomever is interested. We have always been here to discuss the issues, and have continued to discuss them with numerous emails with a ZEA managing partner since my post yesterday. We have not ignored a single communication between us. Some quick points: 1) ZEA emailed ZC on Aug 29, twice on Aug 30, Sep 5, and Sep 15. True, nearly always in response to a prodding email from us, but that's not really the point. 2) The Sep 15 note reminded ZC of two points: a. We don't have the paperwork yet. We can't transfer something we don't have. (Contrary to public statements, the Plone paperwork hasn't arrived either.) I'm glad that someone finally admitted this (that the Plone paperwork hasn't been done!). As you say, it has been been claimed _publicly_ that this transfer was _complete_, and that only the WIPO database hasn't been updated. As you can imagine, if the previous public claims were taken to be true (which we did!), then it should be a matter of "search/replace" 'Plone Foundation' for 'Zope Corporation' and we'd already have been done. I don't think it served anyone's interest to so loudly put ZC down for pointing out that ZEA still owned the Plone TM, when in fact it turns out that this is still the case months after we pointed it out... b. We can't finish the transfer until ZC provides foreign address information for certain countries. This was discussed in the mails cited above. This has already privately been pointed out to ZEA as incorrect. That said, even if it was correct, not a single paragraph of "terms" has been sent to us with a "blank" address line. Surely, a draft of the agreement can be shared with us before this address is supplied? Also, there are _many_ countries (the ones we care most about, as we've been very honest and transparent about this fact in public) where the transfer can happen _immediately_ to our US address. To hold up the transfer in the UK (for example), because we might not qualify in Algeria (no offense to Algerians!!!), is beyond our comprehension. 3) ZEA has well over a hundred manhours over the last 18 months on this trademark. We are getting no compensation for past, present, or future work. Yet, ZEA continues to help the process, as the emails will attest. Agreed, and we appreciate that. Let's not rehash that ZEA shouldn't have ever spent one hour or one penny in this process, had they simply told us that _we_ were in danger from the "subversives"... 4) ZEA gave the contact info for the trademark attorney to ZC, encouraged ZC to contact her (hasn't happened), and instructed her to help. This too is bogus. She is your vendor, and you are her client. You can't get any paperwork out of her even for the Plone Foundation, where there is "no contention or timing issue", but you expect us to deal with her directly, when we have no business relationship with her. Sorry, it doesn't fly. These points might not be 100% right, ZEA might have made mistakes, we're not perfect, the trademark attorney could respond faster, we could email ZC twice per day, etc. This is silly. It has dragged on for months, not days. If we don't write, we get _no updates_. Only when we ask, do we get updates. The updates always say "soon", and then we get _no updates_ again until we ask again, when we again hear "soon"... On a personal note, ZEA is working for free to help ZC improve the value of a sharelholder asset. ZC might have legitimate complaints about ZEA's performance. However, public mudslinging does not incent our pro bono help on the transfer process. As ZEA has stated, ZC can go directly to the trademark lawyer. I don't agree that my post yesterday was public mudslinging. In fact, I went out of my way to say that we reached an agreement quickly and amicably, and that working with the ZEA people was a positive process. That simply doesn't negate the fact that no "progress" has been made, even though a theoretical agreement has been reached. Andreas is a recognized leader in the Zope community (being the primary release manager for Zope 2.x), and is someone I personally respect from my years of interaction with him when he was a Zope employee. He asked two legitimate questions, that deserved answers (I'm sure many more people were hoping someone else would ask). As I pointed out today to one of the ZEA managing partners, the last communication we had from ZEA _after_ we informed them that we had restarted the legal process (the communication was from this same partner) stated clearly that there was nothing that ZEA could do to move the process forward. It didn't seem so harsh to simply answer Andreas' question accurately, with no disparagement to ZEA
[Zope] Re: Zope Foundation?
Whoops. Sorry. I would have replied to the list, except that I didn't realize that you wrote to the list when I saw it in my personal email. Here it is :-) Original Message Subject: Re: Zope Foundation? Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 10:20:00 -0400 From: Godefroid Chapelle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Hadar Pedhazur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hadar Pedhazur wrote: > Godefroid Chapelle wrote: > >> Can the name of people that are part of this small committee be >> published ? I'd like to know who might be representing me, this way I >> can ask him or them about the direction taken and maybe actually give >> them my opinion. > > > I don't think this should be a problem, but I'll have to check with Rob > first, and then the people on the committee, to make sure they don't > mind being contacted. After all, they are "volunteering" their time, and > they might not want the extra burden of communicating with many > individuals. > > Still, this is a good idea, so I will float it early next week. > >> However, the starting point will be much more constructive if most >> members of the community that the Foundation claims willing to serve >> would have a chance to give their opinion on the bylaws as early as >> possible. > > > Agreed. To repeat, we will post everything before the Foundation gets > formed. Obviously, you (and everyone else) prefer to see it earlier > rather than later, but there will be time to comment. > >> This would avoid that the persons currently working in the small >> committee feel personally attacked when one of us dislikes or >> disagrees about some of the points and makes it known loudly... after >> a lot of hard work has already been done. > > > Also agreed, which is why they may prefer to stay anonymous ;-) > >> Ill finish with my usual recall that english is not my mothertongue >> and that it implies that I could be misusing some words without >> knowing about it. > > > This was perfect, no need to apologize :-) Thanks for your quick answer. Is there a reason not sending it to the list as well ? I would appreciate if you would send it also to the mailing list. Thanks -- Godefroid Chapelle (aka __gotcha) http://bubblenet.be ___ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
[Zope] Re: Zope Foundation?
Andreas Jung wrote: What is the current status of the ZF? The process is proceeding swiftly, and hopefully smoothly. We have draft documents of the TM Agreement and the By-Laws, and are well along the way to drafts of the IP Policy and the remaining documents. We have formed a small committee of some representative groups in the Zope community, cutting across interests and geography, and we have IRC meetings to make sure that at the highest level, the initial documents will represent a broad community interest. Before the actual formation of the Foundation, we will post all of the relevant documents for public comment, so those that are not on the current committee will still get a chance to weigh in before the By-Laws (for example) become final. Even after that, the Membership can alter the By-Laws in the future, so this is just the "starting point". It's still quite possible that everything will be wrapped up by the end of October (as originally projected), but we did have the delay in starting (more on that below) and there's still a lot to do, so it could slip a bit, but we certainly are doing everything in our power to make that date. Any progress happened on the outstanding trademark issue with ZEA? I was hoping to avoid this topic in public, given the heat it generated in the past. However, it doesn't seem fair to avoid a direct question, given some recent turns. We have had _numerous_ discussions (all in email) with two members of ZEA. We came to an agreement and all seemed perfectly on target, which is why we began all of the other ZF documents and committee meetings, etc. Unfortunately, ZEA never delivered a single draft of the proposed transfer documents, even though they said that the documents already existed for the Plone trademark transfer. We have been amazingly patient, and have waited _weeks_ between attempts to remind them, bug them, etc. Each time, we get a "sorry, we don't know how much longer it will be, but it shouldn't be much longer." This week, we informed ZEA that we had restarted our original legal challenge to their TM filing, as we simply can't understand the delay and complete lack of communication. Since the legal challenge is likely to take significantly longer than a contractual transfer, it is not possible to have that completed by the time the Foundation would be ready to be launched. Our original plan (which caused the previous public ruckus) was to hold off on the Foundation until this was resolved. This week, before we restarted the legal process, Rob Page made an alternate proposal internally, which seems reasonable to me. While we haven't officially decided to do this, it is very likely that we will: In the event that we have not secured the transfer of the TM registrations from ZEA by the time the Foundation is launched, the Foundation will _not_ have an initial TM license from ZC. The Foundation will still exist, and might get a more limited TM license from ZC, or perhaps even none at all. Whenever the ZEA TM matter is resolved, we'll proceed with the correct TM license for the Foundation. I'm very sorry to be reporting the above. The people that we have worked with at ZEA have been very reasonable, and have come to an amicable solution with a minimum of hassle on either side. Unfortunately, they have simply failed to deliver even a single draft page of a document for us to review, and that is no longer an acceptable situation. ___ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
[Zope] Re: Re: Zope Foundation Update
Matt, unfrotuntately (for me), you make a number of very good points, so I will break my self-imposed silence to respond ;-) Unfortunately for everyone else, this continues the thread, but at least it feels to me like we're "de-escalating" and hopefully actually getting somewhere good, faster... "Matt Hamilton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Hadar Pedhazur wrote: >> Beyond that point, _we_ are the first registrants of the >> ZOPE trademark in WIPO. ZEA registered our LOGO, not the >> word ZOPE, which we registered _before_ they registered the >> LOGO. So, everyone, please pay attention. We did _not_ >> ignore our trademark rights in Europe. We registered our >> base trademark, the word ZOPE, in a number of countries in >> Europe. ZEA then registered our LOGO (taken from our >> website), including the name ZOPE in it (which we had >> already registered). >> >> I am truly unsure as to how to make this point any clearer. > > A few points I want to clear up... the next two paragraphs I write are > about technicalities, I am not refering to any moral right or wrong, or > who did what etc. > > In my view the confusion is apparent. If I go to zope.org I see the same > logo (admittedly with the word community added to it). If I install Zope > and go to the ZMI one of the first things I see is the Zope logo. I can > clearly see how people associate the logo with the software. Very few > clients (and potential clients) we talk to in the UK are even aware of > ZC... *in their mind* Zope is a CMS not a company. You are absolutely correct. In certain usages, we try to make the distinction obvious (like Community being part of the logo, and certainly in adding "Corporation" in our own logo). That said, our "Logo Usage" page on zope.com, which has been there for a _very_ long time, makes it clear that we own the trademark for _all_ variations of the mark, and that we _freely_ license it (without any signatures!) for certain usage, and license it under a contract for all other usages (most of those are free too!): http://www.zope.com/about_us/legal/zope_logo_usage.html The point is that even the logo in the free Zope software is "owned" by us. It just happens to be freely licensed, with no fee or contract. That doesn't make it available to be registered as an owned trademark by someone else. We don't care if potential clients of yours don't associate the logo with us, that's obviously fine. We _do_ care if they associate the logo with ZEA and nobody else. If they associate it with Zope the software, that's fine too, and doesn't require a license, but that still leaves us as the owners of the mark. > And please please please remember that there is no such thing as > 'registered the trademark in Europe'. There are many companies in Europe > and the trademarks have to be registered in specific countries. Again, you are correct. I noted in my previous response to you that you were also correct that we picked countries that were economically interesting to us. >> Read the above response again (and again if necessary). More >> importantly, ask yourself why ZEA admitted to us during a >> phone call that they believe that there were deals that they >> could not have won if they didn't control the mark? Now >> extend that thought one more inch and ask yourself how the >> Zope-based companies that they competed against in Europe >> would feel if they knew that this was a commercial leverage >> point for ZEA in winning against their bid?!?!? > > You are twisting the truth here -- I wish I had recorded the phone call > now to prevent the chinese whispers :) On the call to Lois, Xavier said > that there are certain possibilities of using Zope for EU projects which > would be hampered by a corporation (ie ZC) owning the trademark to the OSS > software. ZEA does not want the trademark. Repeat. ZEA does not want > the trademark. Huh? ZEA does not represent everyone in the Zope Community (as Rob has already pointed out) and worse, does not even represent all commercial Zope companies in Europe. How does ZEA holding the trademark make an EU project "less hampered" than ZC holding it? You can keep repeating that ZEA doesn't want the trademark, and yet, you registered it... >> it's utterly obvious that even the more basic of the "facts" >> are still misunderstood by a number of posters. As an >> example, the repeated questioning of why we didn't register >> our own marks in Europe, which we did. > > Yes, you are still mis-understanding the facts. Europe consists of many > countries, of which you registered the mark in jus
[Zope] Re: Zope Foundation Update
"George Donnelly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > ZC says: the marks were stolen > ZEA seems to be saying: the marks were registered defensively. I am amazed at how people pick and choose what to read and repeat, and what to ignore. I will mix in a few quotes from a few posts responding to my note yesterday to highlight this problem. After this post, unless someone makes a profound new statement, I will remain silent, as many of you have requested, and complete the trademark challenge process through the official channels that have already begun. George, others have already replied to this, but Rob has written about this as well before, so I'm surprised that this is still a question. A defensive registration of _our_ trademark should have been _explicitly_ called to our attention. In fact, any reasonable company would have alerted us to any specific danger, and asked us if _we_ intended to register our trademarks in the appropriate jurisdiction. Beyond that point, _we_ are the first registrants of the ZOPE trademark in WIPO. ZEA registered our LOGO, not the word ZOPE, which we registered _before_ they registered the LOGO. So, everyone, please pay attention. We did _not_ ignore our trademark rights in Europe. We registered our base trademark, the word ZOPE, in a number of countries in Europe. ZEA then registered our LOGO (taken from our website), including the name ZOPE in it (which we had already registered). I am truly unsure as to how to make this point any clearer. > My read on this is that there is a serious communication problem going > on here between the lines. Why doesn't Paul come out and state what the > ZEA position is? Why are ZC's words so angry? There isn't really a communication problem here (though it would wonderful if there was). There is a backtracking and a rewriting of history going on, because ZEA got caught with their hands in our cookie jar. They could have settled this incredibly quietly and quickly. Instead, they chose a path that has led us here. We could have fought it silently too, so it's 100% true that we are the ones that brought this fight into the public. On the other hand, I can't imagine what would have happened if this private battle dragged on until January, and then we got beaten up for missing the launch date on the Foundation, and only then alerted the community as to what was going on. So, we did what we thought was the most prudent thing, and alerted the community 2 days after we initiated the challenge to their registration. I don't know how we could have been more transparent about it. > ZC saying the marks were stolen seems a little over the top. What if ZEA > registered them defensively? if that's possible then ZEA should be given > then benefit of the doubt and not be called a thief. If there was a > need to register them to protect "zope", then why didn't ZC do it? Read the above response again (and again if necessary). More importantly, ask yourself why ZEA admitted to us during a phone call that they believe that there were deals that they could not have won if they didn't control the mark? Now extend that thought one more inch and ask yourself how the Zope-based companies that they competed against in Europe would feel if they knew that this was a commercial leverage point for ZEA in winning against their bid?!?!? And again, read the above to see that our registration of the mark "ZOPE" predates theirs. > Everybody needs to calm down, stop insulting each other and stop > broadcasting this problem to the whole world on zope-announce (for > example). Its making us all look childish. Indeed, we do look childish, and I'm perhaps _more_ to blame for that escalation than others. That's why I will try to keep this as my last communication (at least for a while) on this topic. That said, a number of people responded saying that they were not only glad to be made aware of this problem, but were surprised that they didn't know about it sooner. The rhetoric (mine as well!) is louder than it should be, but I believe the issue(s) definitely needed to be aired, as it's utterly obvious that even the more basic of the "facts" are still misunderstood by a number of posters. As an example, the repeated questioning of why we didn't register our own marks in Europe, which we did. > Making either side into the bad guy is not only innacurate but also > inappropriate and is not conducive to building a community around the > software we all love and are grateful to ZC and non-ZC related > programmers alike for, Zope. Please don't say that things are "innacurate" when you aren't involved, and have already repeated a number of "innacuracies" yourself, which were readily available for you to check before you repeated them... Matt Hamilton wrote: > No, just the opposite. ZC do *not* want to transfer the > marks to the ZF. I do find this position strange. Whilst > they are willing to transfer all the IP, for which yes we > are gr
[Zope] Re: Re: Zope Foundation Update
"Chris Withers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Florent Guillaume wrote: >> The current state of what ZC proposes doesn't prevent anyone from doing >> anything reasonable. >> >> "Give them your hand, and they'll ask for your arm"... > > Indeed. I don't have any problem with ZC keeping the trademarks, but why > are they tying the creation of the foundation onto their retreival of > their lost marks? > > The two seem totally unconnected to me... Considering that we have agreed to license our marks to the Foundation, and that the lawyers tell us that this is the first step, we have to have _clear title_ to them in order to have a valid license agreement. If there's an ongoing trademark dispute, then we can't cleanly license the marks to the Foundation. It seemed obvious to us in our post that we were explaining this, but it must not have been clear enough. Is it clear now? ___ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
[Zope] Re: Re: Zope Foundation Update
"Chris Withers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] This has to be one of the more ill-informed, offensive posts that I have seen from a member of the Zope community, and that's saying a lot. It's obvious that there's a good ventriloquist pulling Chris' strings, since he's making assertions that are so easily proven incorrect that they are laughable. > I'm not sure muppetism applies to the Zope community, it appears to be > Zope Corporation who are coming out of this looking less than clever. Yes, of course, we are looking less than clever. We offer up a Foundation. We give all of our ZPL copyrighted code to this Foundation. We give committers free membership and an equal number of board seats to vendors who pay for those board seats. Somehow, we're "bad guys" in this. I agree. Trying to work with some of the people in this community make me personally feel less than clever... ZEA takes marks _directly from our website_, registers them as their own, and they are "white knights". You're a genius. > It's a shame, because really, they should be the ones benefitting from the > community they've created, but instead they're more and more isolating > themselves from a community which is finally starting to realise that > Zope's continued popularity is not predicated on the survival of Zope > Corporation. See above. More and more we are isolating ourselves, by joining sprints internationally, contributing our code to a Foundation that _we_ are bringing to the community, and by offering to participate completely in the ECM project as well. I can see how this is isolationist. Again, you're a genius. > I hope Lois in particular reads this and understands that you can't bully > an open source community, and doing so is likely going have much worse > consequences for the bully in the medium to long term than it will for the > people being bullied. And now, for the ultimate in idiocy. Lois has not _once_ communicated directly with the "community" on anything other than announcements regarding training. Certainly, she has never "bullied" the community on any topic, including the Foundation. So, how do I know you are being manipulated into making stupid public statements? Someone obviously had to tell you that Lois was involved in the ZEA discussions. Want to know how? Probably not, since you were stupid enough to parrot someone else's words, but for the benefit of everyone else who has a brain, and cares to really understand the truth, here goes: Rob and I had the only interactions with any ZEA members, and they were _exclusively_ with Xavier Heymans and Paul Everitt. After one exchange with Paul, he requested to be let out of the continued discussions due to potential conflicts of interest (which we respected). Lois received an email out of the clear blue from another ZEA member (who had not been on any of the emails between Rob, Paul, Xavier and myself). He reached out to Lois asking her to participate in a conference call with him, another ZEA member (also not on any previous communications) and Xavier. Rob and I were not invited to participate in this call. Lois was _not_ in the loop on our side either previous to this attempt to reach out to her. The three ZEA members discussed the issue with Lois for 70 minutes. I doubt they reached out to her because they thought she was the "bully" in our bunch. At the end of the conversation, Lois came to Rob and I and supported some of the requests that ZEA made in terms of compensation for the transfer. The amount that was originally requested (20,000 EUROS, plus additional "transfer fees") was absurd to me, and even though Lois was willing to find a middle ground, she was the "messenger" that related to them that "management" rejected their offer. Three days later, Lois wrote back a note to Xavier (this past Friday), again playing the messenger, with a offer to pay any expenses that we otherwise would have had to pay to be the original registrars of the marks. It is my contention that if someone steals something from you, you shouldn't have to pay them a premium to get it back, should you? We have had no response to that note, and we informed them more than a week in advance that we would make this matter public if they didn't respond. Obviously, they didn't mind it being made public, or they would have found a way to work it out. Now, let's continue with the history lesson, this time concentrating on me, rather than Lois. I invested in Zope Corporation (then Digital Creations) in October 1998. I was the largest investor (using my personal money) then, and through two additional rounds of funding remain the largest single personal investor (by a long shot!). So, my money is where my mouth is in this company. It was _me_, and me alone that suggested in November of 1998 that we open source the software (before it was even called Zope). It was me that discussed the licensing issues with Bruce Perens to come up with ZPL 1.0.
[Zope] Hadar's Thoughts on Perl for Zope (LONG)
It's been a while since I've communicated directly with the Zope community, and I am truly sorry for that. I have been so busy, that I have actually disengaged from the mailing lists, something I was hoping to avoid doing. I have maintained the same level of involvement with Digital Creations, and therefore Zope as well, but the amount of traffic on the lists was overwhelming me given my current activity level at Opticality. I have only seen a single post to the list regarding the recent announcement of Perl for Zope. Paul Everitt was kind enough to directly forward to me Eric Sink's post, because he knows how highly I regard Eric's opinions. The most important part of that post was Eric's clear statement that there was discord in the community over this announcement. Having been one of the instrumental people in bringing Zope to the community, and having likely been the driving force behind the decision to create Perl for Zope, I would like to directly share the thoughts behind that decision. Please recognize that I have not read any of the posts on the list, and therefore, could very well be repeating important concepts written by others. I apologize if that ends up being the case, but rest assured that this would only mean that I am further underscoring those thoughts, because I didn't have the benefit of reading them first. First, a brief history lesson. I was a major Perl coder for 5 years. I built multi-thousand line Perl programs that did pretty sophisticated things, so I knew Perl pretty well. Then I discovered Python. I haven't written a line of Perl since then. This is not a put-down of Perl, but rather an elevation of Python, IMHO. It is through my discovery of Python that I came across Digital Creations (DC), in 1995. I contacted DC in 1997, and asked them if they were interested in funding. We consummated a deal in October of 1998. The deal happened only because they were a Python shop. A month later, after lots of "active discussion", we decided to Open Source the then named Principia application server. I was a driver of that decision as well. So, for the record, I'm a deeply rooted Python person, and believe it to be the ideal foundation for Zope. So, why would I push for the decision to create Perl for Zope? When I was at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), I used a tool that hooked into the Objective-C runtime, and unified the object model so that it was equally accessible from Objective-C, TCL, Perl and Python. Classes, methods, instance data, etc., were interchangeable, and worked transparently across languages. This was simply magic, and we made excellent use of this in a variety of our applications. Given how wonderful Zope was, it seemed to me that it too could be the foundation for people who had skills in other languages. My original thought was to use the same tool I used at UBS and incorporate it into Zope. This would have allowed TCL to interact as a first class citizen along with Perl. After much thought on the subject, we decided instead to partner with ActiveState (AS). This adds only Perl support (for the moment), but accomplishes a number of other goals, which will hopefully give the community some insight as to DC's direction on this. AS has significant Perl Zen, but has also recently hired some of the top Python talent around. They are embracing Python in a significant way, through Zope, but also as a standalone programming and scripting environment. For more on that, read: http://www.activestate.com/Corporate/Media_Center/News/Press959117519.html (the above will likely have wrapped poorly, and should be re-pasted as one long URL.) There's a more important point here though, and that is that if DC had taken my original approach, we'd have been in the business of managing the cross-platform codebase directly. In fact, that alone was one of the gating factors in not doing it. By outsourcing the cross-platform parts to AS, we each continue to concentrate on our own core competencies. For DC, that's Python, through and through. We've got a world-class team of Python experts, and that hasn't (and won't) change just because our platform will now allow others to hook their code into it. The people internally view this as a positive thing, so they don't feel that they will be forced to code in Perl. To reiterate, Zope is Python, and always will be. Meaning, the core of Zope will continue to be developed in Python (and C), and no one today envisions that changing. However, there was no uproar when we introduced XML-RPC. No one said "Hey, I don't want to be able to communicate with other systems, Zope rules, and others must perish!" Likewise, introducing a tighter coupling, giving others a choice in using their favorite language shouldn't cause you any more grief. To me, it's about "inclusion", not about change. I'm told that one of the protestations is that people will be expected to know Perl if they want to get a job coding in Zope. I guess I have a hard time unders
