Photographer: - / Illustration by Lia Avant

Jim Fulton

It completely depends on their particular situation. If Zope 3 has the facilities they need, and if Zope 2 compatibility isn't an issue, then they should jump in now.

There are still lots of good reasons to use Zope 2. Zope 2 has many features not found in Zope 3, most notably:

• A far more mature Zope management interface, and
• Many more add on products

Of course, Zope 3 has many things to offer too that are not found in Zope 2.

As far as maturity is concerned, we are being very careful to provide backward compatibility for released features. You can build on features and application programming interfaces (APIs) released in Zope 3.0 knowing that they will work in Zope 3.1 and 3.2, and that, should they change, there will be plenty of early-warning.

No, but, fortunately, there are many interesting Python projects that are Zope related. :)

I'd like to learn more about Twisted. I'd also love to have time to play with some of the graphical user interface systems.

Obviously, we'd like to see high-quality components for integrating with enterprise systems, such as databases, directories, and so on.

What ZSPs can do to improve collaboration, (and some finally seem to be leaning in this direction) is to license their components under ZPL rather than, or in addition to, GPL and other licenses.

One of the major stumbling blocks from deploying some otherwise wonderful products has been the choice of license put on them. The problem worsens when you consider having two commercial organizations trying to leverage a piece of each other's code.

ZSPs also need to be very careful about their Intellectual Property (IP) lineage, making sure they know - and document - where all of their code has come from.

At the moment, there is no serious consideration being given to forming a Zope Foundation. In the opinion of Zope Corporation, the community has not made a clear enough case for why this should be done. That said, Zope Corporation has spent a significant amount of time thinking about the issues surrounding the formation of a foundation, and has spent a considerable amount of money discussing the ideas with their attorneys.

It is not inconceivable that a Zope Foundation could be formed in the future, but the reasons for going through the process will have to be better articulated than the previous FUD regarding Zope Corporation's future (e.g., that "Evil Corp." may buy Zope Corporation and do some "evil" with Zope).

There is a risk, but I think that we'll manage to mitigate it. On a technical level, Zope 3, with it's component architecture, will provide far more flexibility for mixing and matching components than was possible in Zope 2.

I think there is wide agreement and desire that components from the various systems should interoperate. At the Goldegg Castle Sprint last September, the developers of several major systems got together and agreed not only to make their systems interoperable, but to collaborate on building next-generation systems on Zope 3. We agreed to build common infrastructure, released under the ZPL.

I would have to say the Castle sprint. It was heartening to see so many people ready to work together to take Zope to a new level.

I'd like to see articles describing new components for Zope 3 that describe both what the component provides and what are the design concepts behind it. This will let people know about interesting components and how to develop for Zope 3.

END of Interview.