[Zope-dev] Re: The bleak Future of Zope?!

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Martin, Maik, Andreas, and others,

I see two issues being raised in this thread:

1. Maik disagrees with the design philosophy behind Zope3 (the Component 
Architecture) and the place Zope3 wants to position itself at in the 
future. As a Zope developer who has spent the last two years both 
developing *with* Zope2 and developing Zope3 itself, I obviously have a 
different point of view about the technical part. Whether Zope3 will be 
success in its market niche is yet to be determined. If you fight, you 
can win the war; if you give up now, you've already lost the war.

Since this is more a philosophical issue, or even a matter of taste, I 
am not going to argue too much about it. I find the component 
architecture superior to anything we have seen before and we will soon 
have proofs that it is capable of industrial strength applications. Most 
other developers who are involved into development with or of CMF (such 
as the leading Plone developers) seem to share that point of view; in 
fact, we all can't hardly wait for Zope3 to hit stable.

2. Especially Andreas expressed his worries about the current release 
policy in Zope 2 and its future regarding maintainance and support. I 
have to say that I share some of his skepticism regarding Zope 2. I 
personally have never fully understood ZC's reasons for the release 
roadmap as it is. I might not see the big picture, but I know I would 
have done it differently. I've always tried to make that clear in the 
past. Coming up with harsh criticism now is not very fair, I think, 
especially when you're as in involved as Maik or Andreas.

Zope 2 development has opened for the community a lot in the past. While 
people were to extend Zope2 with more or less useful features (seemed to 
me that it was more than fixing bugs), all the administrative stuff got 
stuck with ZC. Did anyone from the community ever volunteer helping with 
the releases or the CVS administration?
In this matter, btw, the future painted in Zope3 is brighter: more 
community involvement, more innovations coming from the community and 
more administrative tasks taken up by volunteers. Not that I'm not 
suggesting that more help is needed...

Philipp