At 14:47 07/03/00 -0600, you wrote:
Alexander Staubo <alex@mop.no> writes:
[snipped]
Zope doesn't have the flashy packaging and sexiness of a product line Dynamo -- which, actually, I strongly urge you (and everybody else in this forum) to experience yourself, before you snap back at my again -- and this affects management decisions. Dynamo is exceedingly sexy, and it boasts the kind of bullshit magic that have management and tech people alike drooling.
OK, but see you're trying to make Linux something it is not. Linux is not about marketing. It is not about world domination. We specifically do not care about this :-)
I would say that I specifically do care about this. As a freelance developer I want there to be good recognition of Zope in the market place. It is all about recognition. I was extolling the virtues of Zope to the IT Director at a client and he said 'So why haven't I heard of Zope ?'. My answer, that it was all very new and on the verge of success probably did not convince him. (Of course it is all very new and it is on the verge of success ). If I say Linux, Perl or C then management are usually quite happy. These are recognised names - but nobody owns them. SO it is possible for free software to be successful in the sense that they are as well recognised as commercial products (which have huge budgets behind them). Some management (perhaps most) will prefer to buy a "fully supported" product from a major player. We don't need to take on that kind of marketing head on. Rather we can present Zope and Python as tools to do a job, not strategic decisions to be made by management. However it is reasonable for management to ask "Will Zope be around in three years" - "can we de-Zope if we have to" - "Who owns Zope" "Who uses Zope". Managers are not likely to take a "risk" on a product. At the moment they usually feel happy that Linux, C and Perl are going to be around in three years time. If Zope is to succeed it will be because of its capabilities as a product - because it installs out of the box in six minutes, while the Microsoft equivalent takes 5 hours. Because 60 minutes after downloading it you can be running a web page which interrogates your legacy databases (which is what happened to me). We know about the documentation issue, which is hopefully being sorted. I feel there is also an issue with the product itself. Zope seems to work on two levels - you have a very high-level part - I'm thinking of the security model, the SQL methods and the Z Search interface, the drop-in products like SquishDot etc. These set Zope apart from other technologies which people might use (PHP/ASP etc). You also have a low-level part (External methods etc). Because Zope has the high level part it encourages the thought that there is not much 'programming' needed to develop a Zope site. But sooner or later you are going to hit a wall - for example questions you see asked on this list such as "how do I assign a value to a variable". Well the answer is ... <dtml-call expr="REQUEST.set('abc_search', strip_abc(abc_text))"> ... a string of gobbledygook. (So what does the dtml-let tag do is the obvious question that springs to mind.) It is great that Zope has the low level stuff but I feel that work needs to be done 1) To analyse actual usage of Zope to see what features are being used and which areas of usage cause concern/difficulty 2) To Implement high level dtml tags to implement them. I've stuck my neck out here - feel free to chop it off. Richard Moon richard@dcs.co.uk