For many of the more common unixes, like *BSD and Linux, many products do come as 'packages'. Easily installable binary distributions. Very nice. Python is widespread enough for you to be able to find a binary distribution for many platforms. That said, I often end up recompiling many of the binary distributions anyway, because they don't work. On our OpenBSD installation the python 1.5.2 package didn't like *py files with CRLF line endings in it! How that happened, I don't now, but since most of our files have CRLF, it didn't work. I had to remove that package install the source and compile it anyway... Zope in itself is to totally dead easy to install on unix that a "binary" distribution probably would be more painful that the current one.