Not only has Digital Creations opened the source to its web application platform, the Z Open Publishing Environment (Zope); the company has done so on the advice of its venture capital firm, Verticality Investment Group. A competitor to environments like Allaire’s Cold Fusion, Zope derives from Bobo, an existing open source software toolkit written in the Python programming language, and from Principia, a commercial application built on Bobo which is now being released as open source. Bobo provides the core components of the platform. Digital Creations has developed and refined these components over the last two years. Principia provides an HTML interface to the web object system with many ready to use web objects and an API. With two products, one open source and one closed, Digital Creations found itself having to support two different groups of customers, two documentation efforts, two engineering efforts and so on. So Hadar Pedhazur, a principal at Verticality, asked: Can going open source increase the value of our company? Executives reasoned that the user base would increase dramatically, that software quality would improve, and that the perceived value of the company – and hence of its consulting business – would rise. The exit plan isn’t about the golden eggs (intellectual property) laid last year, wrote Paul Everitt, explaining the reasons for the decision. Give the eggs away as a testament to the value of the goose and a prediction of eggs to come. The decision to take Bobo and Principia open source under the name Zope was announced at the Python Conference in Houston. So overwhelmingly positive was the reaction, Digital Creations decided to throw its relational database integration software, Aqueduct, into the deal, allowing us to legitimately be a ‘free, open source alternative to Cold Fusion,’ Everitt wrote. As expected, the news has caused a flurry of excitement in the open source developer community. Everitt concludes: Watch the room- temperature fusion begin.
