[Zope] Re: Zope Foundation?

[Hadar Pedhazur]

Andreas Jung wrote:
> What is the current status of the ZF?

The process is proceeding swiftly, and hopefully smoothly. We have draft 
documents of the TM Agreement and the By-Laws, and are well along the 
way to drafts of the IP Policy and the remaining documents.

We have formed a small committee of some representative groups in the 
Zope community, cutting across interests and geography, and we have IRC 
meetings to make sure that at the highest level, the initial documents 
will represent a broad community interest.

Before the actual formation of the Foundation, we will post all of the 
relevant documents for public comment, so those that are not on the 
current committee will still get a chance to weigh in before the By-Laws 
(for example) become final. Even after that, the Membership can alter 
the By-Laws in the future, so this is just the "starting point".

It's still quite possible that everything will be wrapped up by the end 
of October (as originally projected), but we did have the delay in 
starting (more on that below) and there's still a lot to do, so it could 
slip a bit, but we certainly are doing everything in our power to make 
that date.

> Any progress happened on the outstanding trademark issue with ZEA?

I was hoping to avoid this topic in public, given the heat it generated 
in the past. However, it doesn't seem fair to avoid a direct question, 
given some recent turns.

We have had _numerous_ discussions (all in email) with two members of 
ZEA. We came to an agreement and all seemed perfectly on target, which 
is why we began all of the other ZF documents and committee meetings, etc.

Unfortunately, ZEA never delivered a single draft of the proposed 
transfer documents, even though they said that the documents already 
existed for the Plone trademark transfer.

We have been amazingly patient, and have waited _weeks_ between attempts 
to remind them, bug them, etc. Each time, we get a "sorry, we don't know 
how much longer it will be, but it shouldn't be much longer."

This week, we informed ZEA that we had restarted our original legal 
challenge to their TM filing, as we simply can't understand the delay 
and complete lack of communication.

Since the legal challenge is likely to take significantly longer than a 
contractual transfer, it is not possible to have that completed by the 
time the Foundation would be ready to be launched. Our original plan 
(which caused the previous public ruckus) was to hold off on the 
Foundation until this was resolved.

This week, before we restarted the legal process, Rob Page made an 
alternate proposal internally, which seems reasonable to me. While we 
haven't officially decided to do this, it is very likely that we will:

In the event that we have not secured the transfer of the TM 
registrations from ZEA by the time the Foundation is launched, the 
Foundation will _not_ have an initial TM license from ZC. The Foundation 
will still exist, and might get a more limited TM license from ZC, or 
perhaps even none at all. Whenever the ZEA TM matter is resolved, we'll 
proceed with the correct TM license for the Foundation.

I'm very sorry to be reporting the above. The people that we have worked 
with at ZEA have been very reasonable, and have come to an amicable 
solution with a minimum of hassle on either side. Unfortunately, they 
have simply failed to deliver even a single draft page of a document for 
us to review, and that is no longer an acceptable situation.