[Zope] RE: [ZCommerce] RE: Philip leaves Arsdigita (was: Re:[Zope]kerberos ? + LDAP + ecommerce + ZEO replication etc)

[Chris McDonough]

> I think Albert's saying (forgive me for speaking for you if
> I get this wrong) that no-one but DC can evaluate the
> opportunity and make the decision if DC should do this work.

I'd like you to figure out whether you'd like to mow my law, Michael.
There's big things in it for you.  Get back to me in a week, please.  ;-)

> Of course, merely *evaluating* the opportunity is a lot of
> work, and there are too many opportunities for DC to even
> evaluate them all. If they tried, they would not have the
> resources left to capitalize on any of them.

Amen!  Please, please please, look at the fishbowl (http://www.zope.org).
There are eight "official" projects underway (ones that have made it past
the stage of inception and have found owners).  There are *sixty three!*
proposals that have either not made it past inception or have not found
owners.  There are an additional ten proposals that have been "deferred".
There are three aborted "official" projects that lost their owner or
relevance while in process.  There are four proposals that sorta greased
their way into being completed without becoming an official project, and
there are nine projects that made it to completion.

This means that for the total of 97 projects proposed by all manners of
folks since the inception of the fishbowl, we've (DC and the community) been
able to "close" 13 of them.  If this was baseball.... well..

The most significant problem is *lack of resources* and *lack of ownership*.
And possibly, to a smaller extent a lack of secured tools to let trusted
outside folks contribute code to the Zope codebase.

> Albert also (in my opinion) seems to be confusing this type
> of application level project with the type of infrastructure
> that DC has to date concentrated on building into Zope.

Amen II!

> the ZCommerce interest group probably did not gain momentum
> because (like many projects) it was too ambitious at the
> outset, and because (also like many projects) it lacked a
> cohesive vision for what was to be accomplished. Attempts
> merely to define the scope were bogged down in competing
> visions. I'm pointing no fingers, as I was as guilty of
> contributing to the confusion with 'wouldn't it be cool
> if...' statements as anyone else. Nevertheless, some people
> *did* do some work, and others did contribute suggestions
> that eventually became features in one product or another.
> So I would say that it has been successful and valuable, in
> a way.

I think it *has* been successful to the extent that there are some
prototypes that can be built upon.

> Since, to date, commerce has not been a large part of the
> projects and consulting engagements that DC has been
> involved in, it may be a good idea for DC to describe what
> sort of consulting engagements it *has* been involved in. I
> don't think that any of us in the Zope community begrudge DC
> their success, and we'd like to be able to make more
> informed suggestions, rather than shooting from the hip as
> it were.

(IMHO) I think DC perceives that the content management market (e.g.
information portals, intranets, newspapers, etc.) is where we'd like to be.
Our recent engagements have been in that space.  Few of these have had any
significant ecommerce requirements.  When they did have significant
ecommerce requirements, we helped the customer build interfaces to prebuilt
packages.  They paid us to help them do this.  We did not take the "build it
and they will come" strategy for this.

> For that matter, what community contributed products or code
> is DC using in their consulting work (if any)? When does
> someone in the community really hit the mark and provide
> something that is not just popular with other Zope
> developers, but with the developers at DC as well?

I can only speak for the projects that I've been a part of, but mostly for
those pojects we've used:

 - PythonMethods/Scripts
 - SiteAccess
 - Wiki
 - Tracker
 - And lots of custom Python code, ZClasses, and external methods

> That kind of feedback on application level work as well as
> 'core' work (such as Python Scripts nee Methods), can be
> very important and valuable. Right now, I have no idea if
> (for example) DC has ever installed Squishdot for a client,
> much less any of a number of other projects such as
> ZPatterns.

Not to my knowledge.  Although if someone needed it, I imagine we would!