[Zope] Q: Verifying the poll numbers

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Everitt wrote:
[snip]
> Wow.  Let's try a different tack.  Pretend there was a for-free Zope
> Studio and a for-fee Zope Studio.  Let's say the difference was either
> like ActiveState's difference (personal use vs. professional use),

This sounds *bad* for the open source effect to me; the chances are you'd 
put development effort in the Zope Studio IDE at the cost of development
effort of the current web based IDE. This is bad in itself, as you'd be
locking up the open source app with a proprietary interface.

Related to that, I don't believe you could make a good Zope Studio IDE user 
interface for each third party product in some automatic fashion; the user
interface would have to be developed seperately for the IDE. Would I develop
an IDE user interface for a product (besides the web interface) if I had to 
pay to use this IDE professionally? I don't think so.

So what would happen with many third party products is one of the following:

  * no support from this IDE

  * support from the IDE but has to be added by digicool (and kept in 
    sync with developments, etc)
  
Very bad for open source development; people will likely stop using
third party products as they don't work with the IDE, and some people will
stop developing them because nobody uses them anyway.

> or say the difference was in "Professional" capabilities.

This would be somewhat better but still suffers from similar problems.
It depends on what these 'professional capabilities' would be. Stuff
that isn't in the through the web GUI? 

> Does anyone think there would be any moderate-sized market for a for-fee
> version?

Hard to say. I guess many Zope developers would jump at some kind of
IDE environment, though I'm not sure the actual added value of such an
IDE is that high compared to the current web GUI. The current web environment
has some advantages you'd actually lose. The coolness factor of an IDE
definitely exists, though.

> How many of you would pay a few hundred bucks for a
> high-quality dev/authoring/admin environment for Zope?

If it's open source, and runs on Linux, I'd contribute some development
time instead. There are in fact several such efforts underway right now.
Some of these projects were or will be abortive, but eventually the open
source ball would start rolling -- as soon as someone comes up with
something that's useful to enough people and takes on the leadership role
to push further development.

Anyway, my main message is that such a move wouldn't be without its cost
to the community.

Regards,

Martijn