As for the link below, Dr. G points out how effectively the ACS team leveraged the ready made tools built into AOL Server, and contrasts this with incorrect references to the Zope team's decisions to "build it all themselves". PG says they built their own Web Server, but it's actually Sam Rushing's "Medusa". Similarly, PG points out that the Zope team built their own RDBMS, but it's really Aaron Watters' "Gadfly". You sort of get the idea that while Dr. G may indeed be the world's leading expert on ACS, that he hasn't a clue about the range and quality of the contributions the Python Community has made to Open Source in general. Not really surprising, but sad that so many readers may be mislead . . .
and more on ACS vs ZOPE here: http://www.photo.net/building->community/infrastructure.adp (at the 2nd finding "ZOPE", I've not noticed this before. Did any one?)
Also, in terms of numbers the DC modules plus the Zope Communities' contributions stand up quite well to the ACS listing, especially considering the Zope Project is barely 1.5 years old!
and his list of prebuilt modules of ACS here: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/toolkit/modules.html
As for a viable alternative to Oracle, let PG himself answer that one: "The open-source purist's only realistic choice for an RDBMS is PostgreSQL, available from www.postgresql.org. In some ways, PostgreSQL has more advanced features than any commercial RDBMS. Most important, the loosely organized unpaid developers of PostgreSQL were able to convert to an Oracle-style multi-version concurrency system (see below), leaving all the rest of the commercial competition deadlocked in the dust." http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html Also see: http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2000-April/024553.html
, though the price tag of Oracle repels more, ;-)
LEE Kwan Soo.
Later, Jerry S.