plonewars.com

To reach more users, we need to reach them. For this we need more than
technology: confidence, sustainability, quality, services. How do you
train people? How long will plone exist? Things like that.

That was one of the reasons to start the ZEA network. It is an
organisation of 22 partner companies. It involves promotion, some
projects and now also open source research.

If we have a clear message to decision makers as a reliable
technology, if we show up in a lot of research reports on open source:
that is good for the partners and for plone. ZEA has pretty good
relations with some universities. Being involved in research could
also mean more funding.

The EU floss impact report was a study on the
impact of free and open source software on innovation and
competitiveness of Europe. ZEA helped that report because of its
connections with and knowledge of those 22 SMEs that are a member of
ZEA. (Xavier showed some of the figures from that report, there’s a
readable abstract on ZEA’s website.

For ZEA, it is important to stay in touch with the researchers that
make such reports because we can give them accurate information on our
part of the IT sector. In the first draft of the EU report, zope/plone
wasn’t included and they also missed several case studies. ZEA helped
them to include zope/plone and helped them with case studies. A core
of that case study was the CommunesPlone project of some 20 Belgian
local governments that also has a lot of contacts with other
individual developers and SMEs. That kind of software ecosystem was
exactly one of the things they wanted to show off in the report.

Current research in the EU – in so far that it has to do with open
source – is mostly research on the impact of open source, the quality,
the structure of projects, etcetera. There isn’t yet much actual
programming going on in this kind of research, but the percentage of
actual programming is expected to rise.

There are all sorts of enlightening results coming from the
analysis-type or results. Analysis of turnover of project contributors
in an open source project: in a nice, regular pattern. Analysis of
dependencies in projects. Project structure comparisons. Etcetera.

There is work to be done, though, to translate the findings of these
research projects