[Zope] A Public Standing Ovation!

[Hadar Pedhazur]

I would like to personally and publicly give a standing
ovation to everyone at Digital Creations for the magnificent
job they did at LinuxExpo this past week. This includes all
of the preparation that went on pre-show (for quite a long
period), and not just those brave souls who talked their
voices out, and demoed their hearts out.

I had reasonably high expectations before the show, but they
were greatly exceeded in every possible dimension. Every
individual at DC had an exceptionally strong personal
presence with individuals, corporate types, the media, etc.
The energy was contagious. Not just for DC, but even a few
of the surrounding booths seemed to feed off of the energy
in the DC booth.

Paul uses the word "gravity" to describe some of the general
momentum at DC. The word is perfect to describe how a much
higher percentage of folks were "drawn in" (gravity?) to the
DC booth than to the average booth at LinuxExpo.

The demos were (as you have heard before) fantastic. The
amazing thing about the demos is that they conveyed very
clearly, in roughly 10 minutes, some extremely powerful
concepts. Most people got it (perhaps after asking a
question or two :-). This is a really hard thing to do, and
again, the DC crowd should be congratulated not only for
building the software to allow these seminal ideas to be
realized, but for distilling all of the amazing things they
could have demonstrated down to a handful of cohesive and
coherent relatively simple operations that encapsulated the
essence of Zope, the Portal Toolkit, etc.

Paul gave a speech on Open Source and Business on Saturday
morning. It was attended by nearly 100 people. No one left
early (I didn't attend any other talks, but I heard that it
was quite common to have a number of early leavers). They
gave him a very nice ovation at the end, and easily a third
of the attendees hung around afterwards to exchange cards
with Paul and me.

P.S. And, in the spirit of the Python community, immediately
after hitting deliver, I'm leaving for the seven hour drive
home after an exhausting and exhilirating week :-)