The Centre Cannot Hold

Chris McDonough

In late march 2009, I visited PyCon, in Chicago. There I had a conversation with Chris McDonough, who was working on what was to become the Pyramid web framework. He and I had a conversation about the dependency cleanup project I had started and that had been making waves on the zope-dev mailing list. Some beer was involved, and some miscommunication. Chris was skeptical that the cleanup project would succeed within the year, which confused me a bit, as we had already made a lot of progress.

But I was talking about cleaning up circular dependencies and the ability to lose a lot of the code. Chris was talking about making libraries with a clear purpose and documentation.

And while we got better dependencies at the end of the year, I failed.

Burning out on Zope

The details of the straw that broke the camel's back (though I hardly have the stamina of a camel) are immaterial. Suffice it to say that when practical disagreements happened our steering group did not function.

So in early 2010 I realized I was putting more into the project than I was getting out of it. I was running out of steam. It was costing me emotionally. So I stopped going to the Zope mailing lists. While we had made progress on matters where there was consensus, maintenance seemed the only consensus that could still be found.

Consensus on the boring stuff is not enough when the web is changing. And the web was changing, as it always is. A lot of the innovation on the web was happening on the client-side, in JavaScript, but Zope had no client-side story. People had moved into different directions, and the community had fractured.

The dependency cleanup was just about the only progress being made -- what about my personal goals? Where was the creativity, the getting together to do new interesting things? It wasn't there. Instead we had a bunch of opinionated people who couldn't agree enough to get anything but basic maintenance work done, and stumbled doing even that.

I'd been involved in Zope heavily, also serving on the Zope Foundation board for some years, including as its chairman. I decided I had to pull back from all of it.

The Zope Summit

In September 2010 I found myself at a Zope Developer Summit, which had been organized in part because of my urging. I had been heavily invested in Zope, and had been for more than 10 years. I had used Zope, benefited from Zope, contributed to Zope, redefined Zope and built on Zope. I had learned from Zope. I had been first board member and then chairman of the Zope Foundation.

I had hoped that a summit could get things moving again. Talk about cool new things that we might do together.

Zope was in trouble. The codebase would live on. It still does. But it is in maintenance mode - it doesn't do much that is new.

I came to the Zope Summit with a gloomy heart. That did not help my mood at the summit -- sorry.

I think most of us left the summit with the feeling not enough had been accomplished. The future of Zope was disappearing. Zope had lost its power to adapt. The web changes, but Zope didn't anymore.

This was the end of Zope, for me. I still use it in the shape of Grok to this day, but it is not the same.

Life After Zope

But this is not the end. The code still continues, and is being used, though is mostly in maintenance mode.

And there is life after Zope. Next I will talk a bit about what came after.

This blog entry is a part of a series on Zope and my involvement with it. Previous.