Photographer: - / Illustration by Lia Avant

Rob Page - CEO Zope Corporation.

In December of 1998, we released Zope as an Open Source product for solid business reasons. Only weeks before that, we'd closed a round of venture capital funding which put us on solid economic ground. We've stayed focused on the business benefits of Open Source and this focus will continue to provide security for Zope the company AND Zope the software. Both are very good and necessary for long-term survival!

2003 was a great year for Zope! According to Netcraft, the number of publicly-accessible Zope installations went from 14835 in January of 2003 to 25356 in January of 2004. That's a seventy-two percent (72%) increase in one year!

As most in the Zope community know, there are a LOT of sites that run behind Apache which makes even the Netcraft-documented growth conservative. Take two Zope Corporation customers – Boston.com and AARP. Both show Apache as their front-end Web servers.

2003 was good to other Zope-based projects including Silva, OpenFlow, and Plone. As a result core Zope is enjoying extra visibility and prosperity. We found the impact of External Editor and Epoz particularly noteworthy in 2003.

In November 1998, we framed a service-centric delivery model and successfully delivered a large number of custom software projects. We invested much of what we earned back into the platform.

We next recognized a noticeable opportunity to go “down-market” and productize some of the software solutions we'd repeatedly delivered to our customers. We started by launching a managed hosting product line. This business has exceeded our own high expectations. We have a press release in the works to announce our newest and substantial managed hosting customer.

2003 was also the year we began to harvest the investment in product development,releasing an upgrade to Zope Replication Services and launching the following new products: Zope4Intranets, Zope4Media (Broadcast), Zope4Media (Print), Zope Registration Manager, Zope4Edu. We will also bereleasing a “horizontal” (i.e., broadly applicable) Content Management System (Zope Core CMS) before the end of Q1 2004, using all of the best elements collected from our engagements at AARP, Boston.com, and Duke University, to name only a few of our customers.

We've been delivering solutions on top of this product foundation and provide exceptional value as a result.

The most-heard accusation, and one we are working to remedy, is a general lack of sufficient communication between Zope Corporation and the community. From our perspective, it's a matter of resources. We must serve our customers from an integrity and contract perspective. We have been building both a business and a positive reputation which, while indirect, ultimately serves the community by providing new customers who will seek out more Zope talent.

That said, we definitely understand the value of our robust Zope community. When we respond to some threads, there is a tendency for the topics to be discussed at length, and if we don't keep up with the responses, then we are perceived as either not caring, or simply not having acceptable responses. But it's not practical, and exceeds our resources, to engage on every thread until it has been exhausted.

Other than that, there was a healthy exchange of ideas in both the series of posts on ZopeZen and in the recent IRC chat. We look forward to more of these in the coming year.

Zope Corporation has made - and continues to make - substantial investments in Zope and does not expect gratitude. As I mentioned earlier, we made the Open Source decision for business reasons. For reasons similar to not being “grateful” to the local grocery store for 'being there' and selling food, Zope Corporation is not looking for the community's gratitude. What we are looking for is a realistic and honest assessment of Zope Corporation's corporate contribution to maintaining robust Open Source software.

If you calculate the opportunity cost just for Jim Fulton's full-time assignment to Zope3 we contributed at least $400k to its development in 2003. Many engineers at Zope Corp have also contributed to the development of Zope 3.

We additionally negotiate actively with our prospective customers to ensure that the maximum practical amount of intellectual property created during any particular engagement is retained for contribution to either the community or our visible source products.

Toward the end of the year we did a huge amount of work on security and authentication (i.e., hundreds of hours). This work is being released to the community this month.

I'd like to sell 1000 units of each of our products! :^)

2004 will see continued steady progress by Open Source software in the enterprise. Europe will continue to lead in the adoption of Zope with the US catching up quickly in late 2004 and in 2005. There remain some conservative IT executives whose trust we still need to win to ensure the continuing growth and long-term viability of the Open Source software community. Only continued technical excellence and clear communication will get us there.

Email is such a valuable asset and IMAP for all its improvements over POP or MAPI, is inadequate for an organization to store, manage and securely share email content. We need something to solve that

Spambayes has a special place in my heart – I'd love to see the underlying approach (i.e., two-way categorization) extended to n-way categorization, to approximate the power of some powerful (but proprietary and expensive software) auto-categorization software we've integrated for customers in the past.

External Editor is a fantastic application but it requires that you be connected while editing. I'd love to see someone make External Editor – Offline mode

We still need better integration on the desktop... I'm not sure exactly how to go about that with so many options but it's something to wish for!

Stay tuned – you'll see some of these capabilities as upgrades to Zope Corporation products in 2004

It will absolutely be the year in which Zope 3 is generally available!! The suggestion that 2004 will be the “Year of Zope 3” underemphasizes the vast quantity of Zope 2.x-based software and applications that are running today. We all have a lot of Zope 2-based support and maintenance ahead of us.

Zope4Intranets, Zope4Edu and our upcoming Zope Core CMS products use large amounts of Zope3 components. From our perspective the features and functions in Zope 3 make it an extremely attractive development environment.

Only time will tell and I sincerely wish you the best of luck. In 1998 the notion of someone spending any money at all on “free” software met with resistance. The model embodied by opensourcexperts.com has a lot of promise.

I'd like to see some stories about commercial Zope-based software. There are some underdocumented and fascinating success stories out there!