Based on the other comments, I gather that Zope just needs to be able to use an OS specific ODBC client driver and not a
Zope specific one, so it seems there is no actual barrier to using Zope on any platform with any RDBM on any platform, apart
from the usual non-commercial support hassles (and corresponding benefits).
This isn't quite true. Zope-specific database adapters (DAs) still need to be written for each DB you want to use. For example, you're not going to be able to use SQL methods to grab stuff out of Interbase any time soon unless you write the Zope database adapter yourself. There is an article on how to write a Zope DA at
http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/WritingADA. This might give you an idea at what's involved in interfacing Zope to a new relational database.
In the case of ODBC (which for all intents and purposes is one type of database, although writing to it allows you to communicate with many) if we were able to use the open source ODBC stuff, we would probably need to do some rigging of the existing Zope ODBC DA to allow it to be used on UNIX. If this happened, it would probably be part of a larger effort to use Openlink adapters for many databases. I'd be really glad to see someone outside of DC pick up the task of interfacing ODBC to Zope on UNIX, because it seems like the DC Openlink initiative has died on the vine.
