[Zope] Zope magazine - The spirit of the community

Trevor Toenjes zope@toenjes.com
Thu, 18 Apr 2002 11:00:20 -0400


Thanks for voicing this Heimo.
I was also taken aback when I saw Beehive is trying to monetize the
magazine.
$75 for 4 quarterly issues written by the community.  Are you kidding?
I have never paid for an online ezine.

I get industry weeklies *mailed* to me for Free that are paid for by
advertising.
If Beehive really wants to get into newsletter publishing, Beehive should
offer this for free and have advertisers pay for it.  After all - we are
Zope users (OPEN SOURCE) with no pockets, NOT Oracle users with deep
pockets.

but I digress...

First off, kudos to Beehive for stepping up to develop this idea.  Yes - it
fits a need.
But, Beehive's decision to charge for their contribution to the community
seems more predatory or parasitic.
I would rather see Beehive take ZC's posture of collaborating with the
community in the spirit of open source development.

When the community is having growing pains and so many people are spending
time working on issues to FREELY offer Z2.6, Z3, the new zope.org
architecture, ZPT, etc...It almost seems like a slap in the face to be
charged to read about the work we are doing for community for free (the
spirit of the community).

I value the development work much more than the marketing, therefore neither

Is Beehive doing this because the community hasn't kept up with the news
items on zope.org?
Maybe Beehive should help the community develop this?
Is Beehive attempting to split the community into groups that can pay and
those that cant?
And then you can further target those that can pay for your development
services(which I here are very good)...

If you have to charge...What is the money being used for?
- to pay for hosting?
- to pay the writers?
  - which writers?
      - guest writers?
      - beehive writers?
      - Can I get paid if I spend time to write an article?
      - do I get paid if my product is featured?
      - do I get paid if I spend my time

If Beehive is defensive or impatient with their response, then I would have
to say their intentions are less than noble.

-Trevor



> -----Original Message-----
> From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of Heimo
> Laukkanen
> Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2002 10:02 AM
> To: mark@beehive.de
> Cc: zope@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope] Zope magazine
>
>
> Hi Mark ( and everyone on the c:d zope-mailinglist),
>
> just stumbled into Zopemag-site and saw what you at behiive have been
> up to (http://zopemag.com/Issue001/index.html). My first thougth was
> that what a nice idea, untill I realized that it isn't that great idea
> - since the magazine is based on paid subscriptions.
>
> I do know that people need to get paid for their work, but that also
> raises the question about what people are getting for the money they
> pay. For example judging by the first issue ( it is not fair to judge
> by the covers, I know ) , there isn't much to pay for yet.
>
> I am all up to educating people more about zope and canonical
> documents like good howto's reports, articles and books are propably
> the best guidance -- and after that people need technical
> documentation. Zopemag now raises a couple of questions:
>
> 1) What is editorial policy:
>       - who can and will contribute
>       - what do you will pay for the contributors
>
> 2) Openess policy
>       - how much content will be open in the future
>         for example would something like making the previous
>         numbers free be out of the question?
>       - what open services will be developed?
>
>
> If the world would be ideal place, I would like to see something like
> zopemag as a completely open system, or partly paid and for example
> archive as open content. I feel that magazine like content is really
> good to tie thing together and get people to find products and other
> howto's that migth interst them.
>
> Of course my point of view is only about educating people and myself,
> since I do not make money out of selling Zope-knowledge, even though I
> make money out of creating services and applications with Zope.
>
> Please answer and start discussion about what community could do to
> support something like zopemag and vice versa. I feel that if made
> well, something like zopemag could be really good -- like the really
> active personal zope-portals have sofar been.
>
> By the way - the idea of zope in intranet's is really well. I am just
> finishing my thesis to a polytechnic about building intranet to
> support implementation of strategy -- and supprise supprise
> as a case example I present an intranet built with Zope and CMF.
>
> -huima
>
>
>
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