[Zope] A Message from Digital Creations

[Hadar Pedhazur]

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.