Hello all, Since their seems to a lot of speculation why we stopped providing Zope Hosting I'd like to clear some things up and also answer some other questions brought up during this thread. In the early days of Zope (when it became Open Source) we fell in love with the software. We did everything we could to learn how to use it and spent a lot of time visiting companies who we thought should be using this software. In some cases we were also approached by fortune 500 companies about building Zope solutions. In some cases these companies were willing to take "a risk" and contracted work out to us in other cases they told us that the infrastructure was not in place to make Zope a viable platform to work with. That hurt! All companies complained about a lack of Zope infrastructure: What was this infrastructure? - Zope Hosting - Documentation - Training and by extension not enough developers who knew how to work with Zope. What did beehive do? We became the first European Zope Hosting provider. We became the first commercial documentation provider. We were the first company in Europe to offer Zope Training and currently offer regular training sessions in Berlin (Germany), Paris (France), Washington D.C. (USA). I would like to stress that our motivations were: 1. to train our own rapidly growing development team 2. to prove that Zope was viable technology worth investing in / and foster community growth 3. figure out what services we really enjoyed providing (money isn't everything) Our conclusion so far is: * Zope Hosting isn't our thing* Plenty other companies all over the world are providing this service for the most up-to-date list please see: http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZSP * Documentation is our thing * I'll never forget the first Python conference that had a Zope track and how many people complained about the lack of documentation. beehive had the same problem but we were documenting how to do things with Zope for internal use -- it was here that we decided we needed to take a risk and pay an editor to professionally edit our ebooks. We offered our documentation for a symbolic price and were amazed to see how many people across the world were using Zope and were interested in this service. The word 'many' here is relative. We were doing low volume publishing and you can take my word for this -- we have so far not made a profit. Breaking even is would be nice but we are convinced that without our efforts the Zope market as a whole would be deemed a little less viable. And for those complaining about 30 DM or 90 DM prices for our documentation -- when you take a look at how many hours, days and months we invest to produce our documentation and you buy one of our your not even paying for an hour of our time (at our hourly rate)! We need to stress that we *love* constructive criticism on how we can improve our doc efforts. Even if we don't always respond to every mail -- we read it and discuss it at our E&P meetings. A big beehive hug to all those who have done so in the past. Regarding our books in print (1 out - 2 to go) if your concerned about spending double digit DM or $ wait till the book comes out go to a bookstore grab a chair and read a bit. If you don't like what your reading -- don't buy the book! Again constructive criticism is always welcome -- we have an email address just for this purpose: zope-ep@beehive.de . One of our books is out in German two more are on the way: -- Zope Web Application Construction Kit (October 2001) Take a look at a copy in your local bookstore when it comes out in mid October. We hope you'll like it. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672321335/qid=1001066852/sr=1-2/ref=... -- The Book of Zope (November 2001) A book aimed more at the beginning programmer. To answer the question brought up by Takashi Linzbichler The Book of Zope is based on our German book but we had more time so we made some changes and added new information. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1886411573/qid=1001066852/sr=1-3/ref=... * We love Zope Training * We have done a lot of individual and corporate training lately and love it! Many new training topics are in production. And we hope to expand this service to make regular Zope Training available wherever Zopeists are. Hope I've been able to clear up some of the confusion and made some of our business decisions more transparent. Regards to everyone, Mark -------------------------------------------------------------- mark pratt (managing director) mark@beehive.de beehive elektronische medien GmbH http://www.beehive.de phone: +49 30 847-82 0 fax: +49 30 847-82 299