Those of you who have been in the Zope community for a while, know that I was an active lurker on all of the lists. For those of you who have been around since the beginning, you may remember that I have even posted a thing or two. Thanks to the phenomenal growth of the community and the traffic, your posts so overwhelmed me, that I eventually had to back off to only subscribing to the "Announce" lists. That is unfortunate, because I truly enjoyed being more active with the community. There have been a number of posts on ZopeZen (and perhaps elsewhere), speculating on the move we made yesterday to close two remote offices. I have no issue with anyone's desire to speculate, and with others' desire to publicly debate the possibilities. This is one of the realities of being an open company, with a wonderful, wide-spread community. It seems prudent however to at least hear our perspective once. It is my intention not to respond to any replies to this post, since I intend to be complete in my statement, and have all too long a history of being dragged into unproductive Usenet flame wars to fall for that again (at least not here :-). Digital Creations closed two small offices yesterday (Wednesday, July 11th, 2001). The two main drivers for making such a difficult decision were: 1) Current Economic Conditions 2) Geographical Challenges with regard to Management The closures had _nothing_ to do with any shift in strategy away from Open Source. There were no layoffs in the engineering group in Fredericksburg, where the core Zope engineers are. There has been speculation that PythonLabs is "on the move again". If this were something we wanted, they'd literally be "on the move" already. They are not! Supporting 100% of the development of Python by one company is a financial challenge indeed. If we didn't consider it a priority, it would have been simple to cut them loose. We did not. Nothing should be read into the above paragraph to say that any part of Digital Creations is a "Sacred Cow", never to be examined and considered for a change. However, it is crucial that everyone understand that this change does not materially effect Zope, Python, or the community. Please understand that it is my opinion that there is no value in my debating the above in public (or private) with anyone. Therefore, please do not consider it an insult if no one from Digital Creations further responds to anything else on this topic.