[Zope] A Tale from IBM land...

[Charlie Blanchard]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 01:39:56PM -0700, Mike Krohn wrote:
[snipped excellent commentary for brevity...]
> 
> Finally, on buzzwords, I'd say go easy on Python. It scares
> people. Say Perl, say XML, say any other ML. Who cares what
> BroadVision is written in? Why should we care with Zope?
> (someone is going to hate that).

oh boy, gotta agree with Python being scary here. the ceo i'm
going to have to convince [see earlier message near top of this thread]
has a couple issues around Python specifically.

1. for all the reasons outlined in earlier posts, he knows very
little about Python and so has no 'warm fuzzies' associated with
it.

2. he is concerned about keeping his legacy programmers happy. to
a certain degree. his issue is that if we are going to move them
from the existing M$ shop that they now are (VB, Access,
SQLserver) and that the staff will have to learn something
different, he wants thier 'buy in' and feels that to do so they
need to percieve value (to thier own future) in learning whatever
new technology we move them to. so it boils down to, "Python?
will it advance my career to learn it vs say Java or [fill in the
blank with whatever here]?"

This is a decision each of us on this list has had to make in the
past. we're here, so we know what _we_ decided vis-a-vis our
future and python etc. but this ceo is going to have to _dictate_
by his decision the future of his staff, and frankly i don't envy
his position, and he sees a 'path of least resistance' moving
into an area where the rewards of the learning curve are better
defined than that percieved with Python. yes, _we_ know that
learning python is trivial but _he_ doesn't! and in fact,
learning zope is _not_ trivial so...

i'm facing an interesting challenge here. especially since this
guy is already letting his staff know he's willing to pay more
and allow a longer dev time if they pick a known (non oss)
solution such as M$ or Java. in all the rhetoric about how much
better a business decision it is to go open source, it's
interesting to see first hand this perception from one who has to
make a choice and put his money and business future on the
line...

-- 
charlie blanchard
http://baldguru.com/
LosAngeles area Zope Users Group http://lazug.org