It presents a rational and clear interpretation of what has been going on, and I agree with much of it.

But I would like to point some things out... They say (I put in the italics): "Rather, we freely gave a fully functioning application server to the community in December 1998, without asking anything in return." I would argue that in this page that there were some things that they expected in return. They didn't require anything in return, but there was definitely an expected benefit, and I do believe that we in the Zope community have provided that benefit.

Let me be clear -- I'm not trying to refute the "without asking for anything in return" clause of the quoted statement. I'm just pointing out that if someone read this open statement, they would think that the only benefit that Zope Corporation got from releasing Zope as Open Source was the coding that occurred during various sprints.

I also think that while there is something to that 60% Zope Corporation Code vs. 40% community code metric, in general lines of code can be a somewhat misleading metric. How often have you attacked an existing problem and found that by careful design and better coding, the actual lines of code count has shrunk? If you start measuring contribution by total lines of code, what you end up with is inefficiently coded modules.

[added 10/30, in response to comments] I am not trying to minimize the contribution of the Zope Corporation by calling their modules "inefficiently coded." I am not in any position to make that sort of judgement, I have not studied the code nor do I consider myself an expert in efficient Python. Rather, I'm trying to point out that trotting out the "lines of code" metric is a way to minimize the community's contribution.

I have no doubt that Zope Corporation has done the bulk of the work on Zope 3, and I'm certain that that will always be the case, especially when you have someone like Jim Fulton on your staff, who has the vision and the ability to make it work. [end added section]

I believe that this open letter tends to underplay the role that the Zope Community has played in the propagation of Zope as a viable tool. The Community gave Zope much more visibility than it would have received if it was a closed-source commercial product. It has put the code through much testing (granted that it may not have been the pieces that Zope Corporation may have wanted them to test, like the security framework). It has contributed many products to the Zope ecosystem, many which have helped Zope become an even more desireable deployment platform (Plone, anyone?).

There are still issues. The Open Letter goes far towards opening communication back up with the community. It's something that has needed to happen for a while. But I think that the letter can too easily be interpretted in a way that minimizes the contribution of the Zope community.

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