[Zope-dev] Re: The bleak Future of Zope?

[Stephan Richter]

Hi,

the points I snipped I agree with and/or have no new input for.

On Wednesday 21 April 2004 05:36, Andreas Jung wrote:
> The reasons for this situation from my prospective:
>
>  - Lots of Z2 people are working now  on Plone projects. Plone currently
> attracts more people
>     because the important and interesting projects are done there. Paul
> Everits goal to grow
>     Zope by 10 times might happen through Plone, not through Zope itself

Yes. Note that there are plans emerging for Plone 3 for Zope 3. I hope that we 
will be able to redirect some of the development power of Plone towards Zope 
with Plone 3. And I think that will be possible. Zope 2 has too many 
abstraction layers: Zope --> CMF --> Plone, CPS, ... That means that if I 
develop a product for Zope, it cannot be automatically used in CMF/Plone 
optimally anymore. With Zope 3 we will get a fresh start on this.

>  - The Z2 development is badly managed. The 2.7 release has been delayed
> for one year or so.

Yes, I hope we will be able to manage releases in the community for Zope 3. 
Jim encouraged this by asking me to do the current Zope 3 releases (so I hope 
I will be able to give away this responsibility to someone else, when the 
Zope 3 community grows -- it will need someone who is constantly involved in 
the real world and sees the needs for releases clearer than I do).

>  - ZC is currently the bottleneck for Z2. 

As stated before, I think that can be changed, if enough interest is shown in 
the community. But I think the Zope community lacks strong leaders; too many 
people are only interested in making money with it without realizing that 
their future depends on the general success and development of Zope.

> Maiks words: Z3 is
>   attractive as an academic project to try out things and concepts but it
> does not attract people
>   in the current stage...maybe in two years from now but currently most
> people are attracted
>   by working and usable solutions like Plone.

And that in itself is the problem. Making money is most important, securing 
the future is second. People don't care about the latter. :-(

>  - The zope.org community site is a mess. Lots of outstanding problems are
> not fixed, the performance
>     of the site is more than poor (it takes ages to login, it takes ages to
> load pages),
>     usability (e.g. when you perform a software release) is bad.

Nobody is willing to contribute. ZC agreed to change zope.org to Plone so more 
community members can contribute. But noone has stepped up; that's very sad.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training