On Thursday, Oct 3, 2002, at 07:14 Europe/Paris, Andy McKay wrote:
I smell commecial interest here. I smell people trying to make that one killer project hoping to make it big, instead of centering around the one vehicle that will help make a bunch of projects big someday.
I won't deny it. I believe I can sell Plone and I'm not sure I can sell Zope as easily. Its a simple fact that I have to sell what the clients want: if I spend all my time concetrating on Zope innards, I doubt I'll be able to pay the mortgage. In the last 3 months 75% of my clients have come to me for Plone, in one case I steered them to a solution in Zope because I felt it was a more appropriate solution.
I agree with Andy. Zope is a tool. Things like Silva and Plone are products. The purpose of Zope is to allow people to build things like Silva or Plone, or things quite different (perhaps custom to their own needs) quickly. And frankly, tools don't sell themselves. People want to see glitz. You could argue that Zope should be the project/brand with the glitz. But you're now limiting people's choices, because you're turning Zope into a product rather than a tool. Back to the X11/KDE argument. Ever looked at an X11 server running w/out a window manager? That's Zope. But it's wrong to "fix the problem" by eliminating X11 and merging it with KDE, because then the Gnome (and windowmaker, and sawfish, and...) people would be unhappy. Layers provide choice. Sure, they also provide a bit of confusion, but this cost is far outweighed by the benefits. Especially in open source, where people participate because they want to participate, not because they have no other choice. --Paul