A series of happenings triggered some ideas in my mind last week. As I
already mentioned here, I`ve been working at Async last week, when
I heard that Chris McDonough was leaving Zope Corp. That was strange
news on itself, and the fact that he launched a Plone-based site
ZopeMafia.com. One of the first things that was brought up was that
Chris was leaving with some other guys to form a consulting company,
which quickly proven to be a hoax.

Then a quick glance at an announcement at Zope.org brought
another issue to my mind. Zope Corp was announcing Zope4Edu, which will
be available under a very strange license, as Hadar pointed out:

Zope4Edu won’t be released under the GPL, nor the ZPL. Instead, it
will be released under the same license that all Zope Corporation
commercial products are, the Zope Visible Source License (ZVLS).

I wonder what kind of business Zope Corp is trying to enforce here,
and why they have put Zope4Edu under such a weird license. It looks a bit like
Microsoft’s ‘shared source’ or whatever is that called, but the
difference is that Microsoft only makes the source available to ‘high
volume’ customers. Another question: why don’t they join the EduPlone
or EduZope efforts?

This and a couple other rumours about Zope Corp make me very worried
about the future of Zope.

Here are some other things that came to my mind:

• A few months ago, there was a rumor about Zope Corp having
  contacted a well-known Zope site about the use of the ‘Zope’ name
  on their domain and site name. I don’t know what was the
  conclusion, but it seems that there are some regulations about
  the use of the ‘Z’ logo and the ‘Zope’ name. I have read the
  blurb, and I confess that what is written there is not clear at
  all for me. Item 3 says:

  …adopt, use or register any corporate name, trademark, domain
  name, service mark or certification mark similar to or
  containing the Zope name or logo.

  So, what about ZopeZen? or Zope-Europe? or EuroZope? or OzZope? or
  even ZopeMafia?

  For the latter, I’ve heard that Chris was already contacted signing
  an agreement allowing him to use the ‘Zope’ word in his domain. The
  others I don’t know. Seems like Chris already is considering to
  change the name of ZopeMafia, as he mentioned on his talk at the
  PloneConf.

• There was also a lot of trouble about the Zope Contributor
  Agreement, and Zope.org. Zope Corp was asking people to sign a NDA
  and another agreement which was slightly different than the Zope
  Contributor Agreement (I think it was called ‘Zope.org Contributor
  Agreement’), and as Paul Everitt pointed out its much
  more aggressive and confusing than the Zope Contributor
  Agreement. Later, Rob Page said they were preparing new agreements
  for ‘sometime next week’. Well, it’s been a month now, and nothing
  came out.

• I may be paranoid, but isn’t it weird that Chris’ blog, being a
  Plone-based site, was only announced after he was officially out
  of ZC? I wonder if they have any internal agreement where
  employees cannot marketing non-ZC software or something like that.

  Of course, Zope.org is Plone-based, but they don’t seem very proud
  about that.

So, as for myself, I’m glad I don’t have ‘Zope’ in my domain or
company name, and I hope that is ‘safe’ to mention the word ‘Zope’ on
this blog. As for the previous Zope.org Contributor Agreement, I wish
I had read it earlier, but then again, I don’t think theres anything
worth bothering about the stuff I produced for Zope.org
migration. Unless they are willing to take CMFPackage out of my hands
;) And anyway, I didn’t liked CMFPackage.

For the others, I wish you all good luck when the ‘hidden hand’
appears to steal your meal, and to you Chris, good luck finding a new
domain. (PS: What about Plope.org? :)