[Zope] Zope Lecture & NLUUG report

[Martijn Pieters]

Hi Zopistas,

Yesterday I gave a 'Technical introduction to Zope' at the autumn 
conference of the NLUUG, the Dutch UNIX Users Group, a little tour of Zope 
in only 45 minutes.

Although it was my first time presenting before a live audience (ever gave 
your first before a ~150 seat cinema hall?), the story came across, and 
many asked questions and came to have a chat with me afterwards.

I spoke to many interesting and influential people there, here's a summary:

- I asked Jack Janssen, maintainer of MacPython, about MacZope. 
Unfortunately, MacPython 1.5.2 is build upon CWGUSI 1.x, which means that 
it will not do threads! Jack is short of time right now, and is looking for 
someone to move MacPython to CWGUSI 2. It then should be quite easy to do a 
MacZope.

- I also had a chat with Emile Heyns, one of the core developers of 
Midgard. He revealed to me that the Midgard team is looking at Zope a lot, 
they think certain ideas are very cool and want to do them too. The 
O'Reilly book deal has them now looking for a publisher as well. =)

- Jordan K. Hubbard of the FreeBSD project couldn't tell me wether or not 
they are bundling Zope with their distribution yet, but a Dutch FreeBSD 
user said he was pretty sure he had seen it on the commit list, meaning it 
will be with the next incarnation of FreeBSD.

- Colin Tenwick, GM of Red Hat Europe, announced that Red Hat will 
soon  provide support for other Open Source software, depending on 
popularity and/or being a good alternative to proprietary software. Zope 
might be a candidate. He also gave me the name of the guy in charge of 
building the RedHat Europe website. Now all I need to do is convince him to 
use Zope.

- And last but not least, I had a great time with Peter Honeywell, of the 
Linux Scalability Project, and a whole list of other titles, including 
secretary of USENIX. He's one cool gadgeteer. His Palm V sports a homemade 
chipcard reader that enabled him to hack my charge-card. He was surprised 
to hear there's a global lock in Python, and he thinks it'll be hard to get 
rid of that. Support for multiple processors is not something Python is 
good at.

A very successful day indeed.

--
Martijn Pieters, Web Developer
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