This reminds me of a point I've been meaning to make. Mike has been looking at Zope, to see what we're up
against and also to have some idea of what it can do in case we're asked to use it some day. His main
impression so far is that they do a *far* better job than we do of presenting it on their website. Of course there is
a company behind Zope and we are all volunteers, but that doesn't mean we can't do a first rate job of putting
together a site to evangelize OpenACS; it just may take us a bit longer to do it (any resemblence between this
and furfly's perpetually "under construction" website are purely coincidental :).
Janine, I do not agree that our competitor is Zope. Most people has never heard of Zope or OpenACS, most have heard of Open Source and Vignette/Microsoft... I think that when a company choses a product the shortlist will be made between open source and not. So you go and compete with a guy selling Vignette, another selling Websphere, 2 selling Oracle,etc ... if there are 20 offers maybe you get another guy selling Zope.
As a consultant I think you have to sell solutions, "kill customers' pain". Some solutions require licenses, are less customizable, less robust,etc... other are royalty free, completely customizable, robust,...
Zope vs. OpenACS is a discussion for us geeks, is not the dilema for the CEO or CTO.
Lets say you have a market of A$/year for internet consulting (morgan Stanley Dean Witter has excelent research with these numbers). Of that B$ are for software and C$ are consulting, I believe that for commercial products such as Vignette C=2B.
With respect to software, if X% of the market is made of commercial solution and Y% is made of opensource solutions, I believe that X>>Y, so when a CTO has to make a decision, he will first decide about commercial vs. open source, if he ever gets to know about open source systems like OpenACS. Again he cares about the kind of solution and the business model behind it, then he might care about the programming language ...
