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What about bobo?

http://bobo.digicool.com/

Note that GvR does not work for CNRI any longer; he works for Digital Creations. He previously worked at CNRI, and when he and his team left, CNRI's management wanted to revise the license to suit their legal view of the world, leading to this morass.

With the move away from CNRI, the Python development team now has private sector employers who presumably demand development time on their projects in addition to the Python core. Since your current employer does not produce educational software, one can only assume that you and your team don't spend much time working on CP4E. In fact, the CP4E page says "The project is now in limbo; we're still interested, and we're still working on IDLE, but we aren't actively pursuing the other goals of CP4E."

How important is CP4E and its goals to you personally? Was it just an neat idea to try to get funding, or are you personally committed to furthering the vision presented in that proposal? Should we expect to see you involved with similar efforts in the future, or are you simply happy to have planted the idea in other programmers' heads?

The Halloween 2 memo specifically lists Software Patents as a way to battle Open Source Software and Linux threats. I bet they won't be afraid to use this patent when they feel cornered by OSS or Linux.
Martijn Pieters, Software Engineer
Digital Creations, Creators of Zope

You might want to check out Zope. Digital Creations took a moderately successful commercial product, and turned it into a category killer by open sourcing it. Here is their account of how the decision was reached, and here is a presentation.
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This is precisely why people approach VCs. If you're product's good and you believe in it, then you need capital to start the ball rolling and pay your in-house developers. This model only works if there's a market for support. Zope is a good example and is used on OpenSource.org's business person's case for open source. Paul Everitt of Digital Creations was told to go open source by their VC Verticality, and it looks like it's been a success. Everitt makes a very eloquent case for his open source business decision.

Netscape 6 beta 1 is but the first branded Mozilla browser. It is based on Mozilla, as Stronghold and Red Hat Secure Server are based on Apache. It adds features, has it's own version of the UI (which is completely replacable, not just the pictures on the buttons)

Whatch out for more browsers based on the Mozilla core. Mozilla itself is aimed at the developer, but there will be 'easy' versions, kids versions, embedded versions, etc. Long live Mozilla!

You got it wrong last time with all the fuss about a discussion on security related bugs in bugzilla, instead presenting it as a decision. Please get your journalistic facts straight.

Martijn Pieters, Software Engineer
Digital Creations, Creators of Zope

Digital Creations is doing smashing as consultants with their open-source package, Zope.

In fact, opensource is working well enough for them, they just announced that they will open-source the Zope Enterprise Option, a package they used to charge a minimum of $25,000 for.

Digital Creations is doing smashing as consultants with their open-source package, Zope.

In fact, opensource is working well enough for them, they just announced that they will open-source the Zope Enterprise Option, a package they used to charge a minimum of $25,000 for.

"WildCat BBS software has used the technique of wildcard DNS entries to track incomming tcp/ip user 'sessions' for years. Simple case of prior art."

Abused tracking is, of course, but this is such a clumsy method that it is not likely to spread.

Indeed, I'm not too concerned about this being patented since the URL http://bgfv3wz0.software-patents-are-bad.com/ has no obvious advantage over http://www.software-patents-are-bad.com/bgfv3wz0/.

Your software becomes much simpler, you don't have to rewrite every URL.

You can use absolute URLs within your site (/About/ instead of ../../../About/), so you can reuse navigational elements throughout your site at every level and it reduces the chance on errors.

Not exactly prior art since it wasn't that long ago and in any case toth doesn't log, but still that makes it obvious in my book. Same problem as ever though: what's "obvious" to a bunch of web developers who read RFCs is not generally "obvious" to bunch of patent clerks who read the National Enquirer

And who says you get the images from the [sessionid].website.url server? You can still serve your images from www.website.url. And any other static content, so caching works on that just fine. Actually, this is what slashdot does. Just look at the source of this page, and pay attention to the URL of every image.

Fact is, e-commerce needs state. State can be maintained by using cookies or using session IDs in the URL. Up until now this was done using the path portion of the URL, or the query string. These people figured out you could use the hostname as well.

With all three these techniques you loose cachability of the object the URL points to, but this will not prevent a good site desingner from using static, constant URLs for static, constant content.

As much as I am opposed to software patents, the idea is a clever use of the available resources and techniques. And I don't think there is any prior art.

If you want to fight this, you will have to come up with better arguments. Have a look at "Against Software Patents" for some amunition. Note that this document is 9 years old, so the amunition might be a bit weak. However, some good public momentum behind it might just get something done.

Martijn Pieters, Software Engineer
Digital Creations, Creators of Zope

The reason I restrain is that my source code might be worth a lot of money someday. If I GPL it then people can get it free. Isn't there a lot of profit lost in open sourcing?

There are companies which did exactly this, opening there former proprietary software. Two very well known examples are Mozilla and Zope. There is a good description how Digital Creations went open source with Zope and what their fears were and why they still did it.

- Stephan.

Erm.. sometimes it is A Good Idea (TM) to give away the most prized possession of a company. But only when it will make them more viable and profitable.

Take my employer for example, Digital Creations. In November 1998, they were a product company, with a great product. A Web Application Server that, if only the customers would see it, was much better than what all the multi-billion-dollar companies were offering. Not many people were listening to the tiny voice of this company though.

Then a VC convinced them to make that product Open Source, and switch to services, solutions build upon that product. Now, over a year later, the company is hiring like crazy, O'Reilly has started funding the company, and the product is making great inroads in the marketshare of those aformentioned multi-billion-dollar companies. Going Open Source is paying off.

Anyone of you ever heard of Zope? Let's just say that 85% of all people I asked at LWE did. Long live Open Source, long live the free messengers.

Not that this little story has any impact on Transmeta of course. They have a solid business model based on a product that just would not benefit from going Open Source. Their voice is being heard, they are making the inroads just like that. And not that Metcalf cares. Change is just scary, but he'll get over it.

Martijn Pieters, Software Engineer
Digital Creations, Creators of Zope

Erm.. sometimes it is A Good Idea (TM) to give away the most prized possession of a company. But only when it will make them more viable and profitable.

Take my employer for example, Digital Creations. In November 1998, they were a product company, with a great product. A Web Application Server that, if only the customers would see it, was much better than what all the multi-billion-dollar companies were offering. Not many people were listening to the tiny voice of this company though.

Then a VC convinced them to make that product Open Source, and switch to services, solutions build upon that product. Now, over a year later, the company is hiring like crazy, O'Reilly has started funding the company, and the product is making great inroads in the marketshare of those aformentioned multi-billion-dollar companies. Going Open Source is paying off.

Anyone of you ever heard of Zope? Let's just say that 85% of all people I asked at LWE did. Long live Open Source, long live the free messengers.

Not that this little story has any impact on Transmeta of course. They have a solid business model based on a product that just would not benefit from going Open Source. Their voice is being heard, they are making the inroads just like that. And not that Metcalf cares. Change is just scary, but he'll get over it.

Martijn Pieters, Software Engineer
Digital Creations, Creators of Zope

What do you mean, inflated version number?

Netscape Open Sourced version 5, but never released it.

Mozilla is build partly on version 5, but has lots of new code. Netscape 6 is based upon the results of the Mozilla project. Sounds logical to me.

Martijn Pieters, Software Engineer
Digital Creations, Creators of Zope

Zope is extensible in Python. The ACS is a large package of tcl code that accesses the AOLserver API (AOLserver is now also free as in speech). Both encourage a style of programming that is more maintainable than Perl. If you knew Perl already, I strongly doubt you'd have asked your question. That's actually a good thing -- the same things that make Perl great for simple one-shots make it tough for novices to maintain. Python (and to a lesser extent, tcl) is a great deal cleaner.

I didn't mention Java or Jserv -- there is a package called JetSpeed which the Java-Apache group has put out, but my initial reaction was that it was very slow. Don't take my word for it, though -- take a look and decide for yourself.

Don't be an idiot and lock yourself into Yet Another Uncaring Vendor. You can get support for Zope or the ACS direct from the developers (Digital Creations or ArsDigita respectively). If you choose to use mod_perl and postgres, you still can get professional support. With Lotus you can look forward to servers that don't write log files, proprietary APIs, flat file "databases", and other such niceties.

Don't buy into it.

Check out Zope from Digital Creations. Its a completely Open Source eCommerce development kit. I'm not affiliated with DC in any way, but I have been using Zope for the past few weeks and I can tell you that it totally rocks. Its one of the most impressive pieces of technology I've ever seen. And yes, DC will be happy to sell you varying levels of consulting service and support.

You may also want to check out ArsDigita, a relatively open source toolkit based on an Oracle backend and AOLserver frontend. ArsDigita is an excellent company run Phillip Greenspun. They'll also be quite happy to take your money for hand holding and whatever else you need.

Finally, before you jump onto the eCommerce bandwagon, check out Web Tools Review, an excellent site run by Greenspun et al.

Certainly not. First of all, Zope isn't a language -- Zope's DTML language is just a small component in a large system. You don't even need to use DTML in order to reap Zope's benefits.

Secondly, Zope's strength is its open-ended, object-oriented nature. Comparing Zope to PHP is largely meaningless. PHP is a preprocessor; Zope is a middleware platform. Zope has been specifically tailored for enormous, complex, high-volume web systems.

With the recent introduction of the Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO), which will let you set up multiple object database servers that may mirror their data through replication, Zope grows to even higher planes of scalability and capacity. Combine ZEO with round-robin DNS and you have a good load-balanced failover solution.

A little research into what Zope really is might have helped. You're just spreading disinformation.

While it may not exactly be Notes (yet). Check it out. We use and like Notes but have infact moved some sites and work onto Zope It has most of what you've just mentioned including relational database connectivity an indigenous object database and a drop in product called Confera for discussions. It's a true application server that is managed through the web. It's mostly written in Python so it's easily extensible. Zope is moving fast and getting features and products added almost daily because the company that created it Digicool open sourced it. It may not do exactly what you want but I'm sure it will still be something that you would want to look at.

The downside at the moment is that, because Zope's fore-runner was an internal product used by Digital Creations, the DC people didn't have a lot of documentation for it. They've been working on getting more docs written, but the picture is still somewhat scattered. If you end up reading the source code, it would be difficult for a Python newbie because the code so full of cutting-edge technique. Luckily, you can do a lot without having to dive into the source code; it only matters for more complicated things like writing a new product or DTML tag for it.

While you're at it, check out Squishdot, which is still in really early alpha; it'll be astoundingly cool when it's finished.

My current project, the MEMS Exchange, is looking for good developers, and placement services aren't much help, because the people we've interviewed often seem to be clueless. (Write me if you'd be interested -- we're in the DC area, and are a research-oriented non-profit.) We've had horrifying experiences where a candidate's CV looked good, but it all fell apart at the interview, where we found they couldn't write pseudocode for reading a file line-by-line. If we knew a person could at least design and code reasonably, because we knew they'd maintained a non-trivial software package, that would be a good foot in the door. Similarly, a while back Digital Creations got a bunch of new employees, hiring practically everyone who had done a significant project using Zope. This is another good reason to hack on free software; it can earn you a reputation, and that reputations can lead to better offers and more interesting jobs.