I think Albert's saying (forgive me for speaking for you if I get this wrong) that no-one but DC can evaluate the opportunity and make the decision if DC should do this work.
I'd like you to figure out whether you'd like to mow my law, Michael. There's big things in it for you. Get back to me in a week, please. ;-)
Of course, merely *evaluating* the opportunity is a lot of work, and there are too many opportunities for DC to even evaluate them all. If they tried, they would not have the resources left to capitalize on any of them.
Amen! Please, please please, look at the fishbowl (http://www.zope.org). There are eight "official" projects underway (ones that have made it past the stage of inception and have found owners). There are *sixty three!* proposals that have either not made it past inception or have not found owners. There are an additional ten proposals that have been "deferred". There are three aborted "official" projects that lost their owner or relevance while in process. There are four proposals that sorta greased their way into being completed without becoming an official project, and there are nine projects that made it to completion. This means that for the total of 97 projects proposed by all manners of folks since the inception of the fishbowl, we've (DC and the community) been able to "close" 13 of them. If this was baseball.... well.. The most significant problem is *lack of resources* and *lack of ownership*. And possibly, to a smaller extent a lack of secured tools to let trusted outside folks contribute code to the Zope codebase.
Albert also (in my opinion) seems to be confusing this type of application level project with the type of infrastructure that DC has to date concentrated on building into Zope.
Amen II!
the ZCommerce interest group probably did not gain momentum because (like many projects) it was too ambitious at the outset, and because (also like many projects) it lacked a cohesive vision for what was to be accomplished. Attempts merely to define the scope were bogged down in competing visions. I'm pointing no fingers, as I was as guilty of contributing to the confusion with 'wouldn't it be cool if...' statements as anyone else. Nevertheless, some people *did* do some work, and others did contribute suggestions that eventually became features in one product or another. So I would say that it has been successful and valuable, in a way.
I think it *has* been successful to the extent that there are some prototypes that can be built upon.
Since, to date, commerce has not been a large part of the projects and consulting engagements that DC has been involved in, it may be a good idea for DC to describe what sort of consulting engagements it *has* been involved in. I don't think that any of us in the Zope community begrudge DC their success, and we'd like to be able to make more informed suggestions, rather than shooting from the hip as it were.
(IMHO) I think DC perceives that the content management market (e.g. information portals, intranets, newspapers, etc.) is where we'd like to be. Our recent engagements have been in that space. Few of these have had any significant ecommerce requirements. When they did have significant ecommerce requirements, we helped the customer build interfaces to prebuilt packages. They paid us to help them do this. We did not take the "build it and they will come" strategy for this.
For that matter, what community contributed products or code is DC using in their consulting work (if any)? When does someone in the community really hit the mark and provide something that is not just popular with other Zope developers, but with the developers at DC as well?
I can only speak for the projects that I've been a part of, but mostly for those pojects we've used: - PythonMethods/Scripts - SiteAccess - Wiki - Tracker - And lots of custom Python code, ZClasses, and external methods
That kind of feedback on application level work as well as 'core' work (such as Python Scripts nee Methods), can be very important and valuable. Right now, I have no idea if (for example) DC has ever installed Squishdot for a client, much less any of a number of other projects such as ZPatterns.
Not to my knowledge. Although if someone needed it, I imagine we would!