Obzervationz 2004/2

CMF 1.5 Roadmap, Redux

Consolidating this week's flurry of discussion about the shape of a new CMF release.

Eben Moglen @ Harvard (GROKLAW)

Moglen said:

[McBride and Gates] see software as a product. In order to make their quote "business model" close quote work, software must be a thing which is scarce. And out of the scarcity of software there will be a price which can be extracted, which will include an economic rent, from which Mr. McBride has suggested somebody will be enabled to buy a second home.

and later:

We think that software is not a product, because we do not believe in excluding people from it. We think that software is a form of knowledge. The International Business Machines Corporation, the Hewlett Packard Corporation, and a number of other organizations either represented here in body or in spirit this evening have another theory, which is that software in the 21st century is a service, a form of public utility combined with knowledge about how to make best use of the utility, which enables economic growth in peoples' enterprises generally, from which there is a surplus to be used to pay the people who help you produce the surplus, by making the best possible use of the public utility.

Zope straddles Mogen's two "good guy" alternatives (free knowledge and service), and enables the creation of "scarcity"-based products, which is a source of not a little stress in its ecosphere.

OpenPKG 2.0 now available!

OpenPKG is a meta-distribution, desinged to allow sysadmins to package software for deployment in controlled envrionments on a large number of host operating systems:

• FreeBSD 4.9/5.2

• Debian GNU/Linux 2.2/3.0/3.1

• Red Hat Fedora Core 1

• Red Hat Linux 9

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

• SuSE Linux 8.2/9.0

• Gentoo Linux 1.4.3

• Sun Solaris 2.6/8/9/10

CMF 1.5 Roadmap

Lots of really fine churn here, including a high energy discussion about how / whether to add Archetypes and its supporting infrastructure.

One counter-proposal is to find a way to merge / integrate Nuxeo's CPSSchemas, although I am beginning to think such an effort might be out of scope for a 1.5 release.

Lastminute turns to open source for site overhaul

Kudos to Seb Bacon's Jamkit , and to Chris McDonough, who consulted to Jamkit for this deployment.

Interesting to see this on a Java-focused site:

Online travel company Lastminute .com is using new open-source technology to rebuild the front-end architecture of its Web site, as part of a major site overhaul that will begin in the spring.

Web services firm Jamkit has been advising Lastminute on the new open-source Web server ZOPE, which provides a toolkit for content management. The system is written in Python, which Jamkit called an "up and coming" programming language to rival Java.

Issues with packaging Zope 2

Zope has always been an odd beast to package. It uses and depends on Python, and includes a large number of Python packages / modules / extensions, but is not properly any one of those three: it is an application.

Worse, Zope-the-application, like PostgreSQL, runs server instances; each instance on a machine has its own configuration / database setup.

Here are a couple of desiderata for any scheme for packaging Zope:

platform neutrality

the solution should make generating Debian, RPM, etc. packages simple, without requiring any one of them; it should also be trivial to generate Windows installers, as well as source distributions. distutils makes a partial start at this goal, which is a big plus for finding a way to reuse it.

data with code

Zope makes heavy use of the technique of packaging application data (icons, templates, help files, etc.) with the Python code which uses them; that code then introspects __file__, etc. to find the files. distutils' support for bundling data is primitive, at best.

only explicit sharing

don't assume that every other user on the system wants / needs the component to be packaged; rather, make it possible to share, but not mandatory. distutils assumes sharing by default (it wants to pollute site-packages), and requires ill-documented workarounds to disable that.