[Zope3-dev] Re: Can we provide a Zope3 Collective?

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Jim Fulton wrote:
>> As for new packages, especially ones that come from outside the core 
>> development team around ZC, I wouldn't say that the zope.org 
>> repository would be the best place. We eventually would like to 
>> enforce and furtherly support cooperation between different 
>> communities, such as Silva and Plone; a "neutral" place to do this 
>> sounds like a much better idea to me (and others, frankly).
> 
> In what way is zope.org not neutral?

- Because it is maintained by ZC.

(It was only at EP I have heard that ZC is looking for people from the 
community to help out. It still hasn't happened, afaik.)

- ZC is a competitor in the field.

- IP is assigned to ZC in half. *That* is probably the most un-neutral 
things of all.

> > The bar for commitment won't be as
> > high as for the zope.org repository (contributor agreement, ZPL etc.), 
> 
> And therein lies a weakness in a separate repository.  The rules:
> 
> - Consistent open license

Plone chose GPL, thus could never have been part of zope.org, not even a 
subpackage. I'm not advocating GPL, but zope.org takes away the freedom 
of free licensing.

> - Ony check in your code
> 
> - Don't knowingly violate patents
> 
> protect the user's of the software. Further, for products without
> external dependencies, including them in the zope.org
> repository will cause them to be tested and refactored by the Zope
> developers. This is a *significant* bemefit for developers.

I think that's an idealistic point of view. If this repository will grow 
(and I'm certain it will do so tremendously), each patch to Zope3 will 
increasingly be harder to checkin because it is more likely to break 
something in one of those external packages. Under those circumstances, 
people will loose interest in refactoring and thus improving Zope3.

Furthermore, the zope.org repository has a strict "all tests must pass" 
policy. I think it's good for Zope3 and its immediate sattelite 
projects. But when you're actively developing something, rapidly that 
is, you might not care about working code for the moment; you might not 
care about tests for the time being. People sometimes need to do things 
quick and dirty, even though the development policy of Zope3 itself 
isn't like that all.

Moreover, an independent project base allows us to do be much more 
sponaneous, IMO. "You need a wiki, need a bugtracker, need a 
mailinglist? Sure, let me do it for you..." z3 base is about community 
self-organization, which zope.org is utterly lacking.

Philipp