Plone Foundation

I don't like the Plone Foundation.

The problem is, it's difficult to express this sort of thing without people assuming this is some blind disillusionary frustration, and it's not. I've been involved in the Plone Community for over four years now and I've found it to be far too much of an "in" world. Cries for help and contributions from the community at large turn into immature self-fulfilling prophecies which, in a severe failure of leadership, blame would-be contributors for not being experts.

So, if you've got an idea about Plone, something your customers sorely need, the message I hear from Plone Foundation is typically: "Wait a few months, or years, we know what we're doing and we don't need your help."

Are you guys fucking serious? C'mon.

With recent officialities surrounding the creation of a formal business structure with some associates, and concerns such as the purchase of USD$1M or greater of General Liability, I wonder how likely a situation where the Plone Foundation says: "Just Trust Us", may I be of liability.

The truth is, I'd prefer not to join the Plone Foundation, because I can be a great QA user of its' services. I'm glad to share my ideas, but I feel that it is poignant that a new developer in the community should be able to get by without becoming a member of the PF board.

There's just no feedback process. I have heard for years that "The Foundation" is "Protecting Plone", but how? What the hell do you guys do other than tell me, continually, that my clients and my interests are not worthy of Plone? Howabout broken promises?

I find myself wondering if the Plone Foundation can be actionable if statements it has made about the future of Plone become part of an insured contract which experiences a failure. If not, then what value is it? I, as an independent consultant, need to provide a $1M guarantee to some clients, and what is the PF doing to keep my general liability rate down?

That said, I like a lot of people involved in PF, as I happen to like most of the people in the Plone Community at large. This is also a difficult issue to approach because I'm not ever entirely sure who all is involved, and so my frustrations and concerns may be misdirected. Are there forces within the PF who align with my interests, but simply aren't given much more than lip service by other members of the Board? I don't know.

Is there a poignant reason we don't see meeting minutes online? Does the Foundation have funds to hire someone to fix the broken membership tool? I understand we are a non-profit, but 80% of my business is from a non-profit who seems to take matters much more seriously than PF as a whole.

That and, of course, I hate the freaking contributor agreement and feel that FSF and related contributors to the founding of PF have caved a great deal. The structure of PF is not consistent with the understanding of Free Software I've built over the past ten-plus years.

For one, PF has the ability to relicense Plone, Archetypes, et. al. under a BSD-style license, which would most certainly un-free it. If Plone is "Open-Source" and not "Free", then why seek the help of Free Software advocates, when there are perfectly good Open-Source advocates? If we are licensed under GPL now, why create an organization to "Protect" something in such a way that its' authors' intent in licensing is not respected.'

It is widely held, for instance, that the source code to the Linux kernel is protected from license changes due to its' community copyright holdings. If anything ever approached impossibility, it would be proving legally that you had the permission of all of the contributors to such a work, even if you did.

So, there's my $0.02. I enjoy working with Plone, but I fear that the community is worse off with the current PF structure than with an ad-hoc melee of copyright ownership. I've yet to hear a good reason why this is the case other than that other folks "know better" and that I should "shut the hell up". Naturally, I don't respond very well to this sort of logic.