Re: [Fsfe-uk] Zope UK?

[James Heald]

Alex Hudson wrote:

> Hey everyone.
>
> Does anyone here have anything to do with, or had any contact with, the
> "Zope UK Association"?
>
>         http://www.zopeuk.org/
>
>         http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/23/open_source_trade_association/
>
> Supposedly this is a general "Open Source" organisation, although it
> does seem quite plainly aimed at Python/Plone/Zope. It would be useful
> to know if anyone here is part of it before we go trying to contact them
> separately :D
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alex.


As a Content Management System, Zope has been very successful in 
establishing itself with a lot of continental governments and public 
organisations -- it's said that in France, if you now want to use a CMS 
other than Zope for a public project, you have to submit a detailed memo 
saying why.

One of the key selling points is how, being open source, diferent public 
bodies can use Zope/Python/Plone solutions and build on each others' work.

There were quite a lot of Zope/Plone/Python people at ACCU in Oxford 
last week (the last two days of which included a whole Python UK meet).
Paul Everitt of Zope was there for the whole programme, and there were 
several mentions of the launch do in the Houses of Parliament.

My impression is that this is primarily an umbrella group for people 
providing Zope-based solutions/support; but acceptance of Zope may act 
as a spearhead for other Open Source / Free Software offerings.

"Zope is an open source web application server primarily written in the 
Python programming language. It has many features to rival closed source 
alternatives including a transactional object oriented database, dynamic 
HTML templates, scripts, a search engine and many connectors to the 
leading relational database platforms."

Paul Everitt was at the panel session I did on Software Patents, but I 
never really got to talk to him -- I imagined that pushing Zope was 
message enough for the Houses of Parliament launch, and they probably 
wouldn't have wanted the topic of eg software patents raised there.

But I probably should have tried to find out from him whether he has 
made contacts who might be able to bring any influence to bear.