Happy Birthday to both Me and VonPlone, a project which has been incubating for some time and officially rears its’ head today.
For some time, key members of the Plone community have told me that by wanting to “branch” portions of Plone to prove that ideas I had were worthy of merging into core, I would be “forking”, or creating a social divergence for the software. Sadly, the only conclusion this leads to is that it’s going to be necessary for the protection of all that is good and holy in the world to fork Plone into something which socially works, as a community - to do exactly what they were afraid that facilitating innovation would result in.
The Plone community is great and I’ve made many great friends and professional assocations in it, but I’ve had enough of the pharoahesque control structure with no social mobility except through re-education, submission, and the deification of other mere mortals with a curved decline in communication. Plone is Free Software, it is Open-Source, but the Plone Community is a Cathedral within a Bazaar.
Leaders can’t decide what Plone “is”, or even what the definition of “is” is, when someone new is accepted into leadership, their new ideas are acceptable, but the people pushing this on their clients all day in many cases simply have to answer that the Plone gods have not blessed a fix for a problem which they can explain quite easily in an elevator.
Let’s think this through, though: maybe they’re right. Maybe, as Chomsky notes from the teachings of Harold Lasswell, we simply ’should not succumb to “democratic dogmatisms about [us] being the best judges of [our] own interests.” Because [we]’re not.’ Perhaps today’s Plone Team are evidenced as “the best judges of the public interest.”
It’s time, I say, for us to pull our heads out of the sand, to stop beating ourselves up that we can’t, collectively and without their guidance, accomplish something not only better, but measurably compatible and far more progressive than what these inept freaks we call mentors have shoved down our customers’ throats for years.
Let’s give it a try. Let’s be as noninvasive as possible at first, to follow the path of Plone itself, which, began as a CMF skin.
I’d like to see a 1.0 release by Christmas 2008, and an 0.1 alpha before my fall semester begins. I propose that we use the GNU Affero General Public License, v3, which extends Free Software rights to the users of network applications, and I do not wish for us to have a contributor agreement.
I’ve discussed the Plone Foundation’s contributor agreement at length with RMS and though the FSF’s head counsel wrote it, he said that he plans to write an essay on how this violates the spirit of Free Software. I did agree in a further conversation with Alan Runyan that I’d sign it so that I can contribute, and still may, but don’t feel it’s best for VonPlone to be “protected” in this manner. If a lot of people who want to contribute feel otherwise, I could be convinced of another path, but the PF agreement simply requires that you allow the voting membership of Plone Foundation to relicense your code under terms other than that which it was originally made available to you.
Originally, I hoped that people would just want to be involved in this project as a sandbox for changes that need to be made in Plone proper, but and I’m excited to hear that so many people I respect and admire in the community want to be involved, but it frustrates and saddens me that this is because of problems like rejected bugfixes, sans explanation.
It’s time for change. We can do this. Alex Limi made a big deal at one point about Plone being “software that we love”, and I think VonPlone is a way to show how much we love Plone by showing it how much better it can be.
Ah, I think we should also eventually come up with a name we can trademark without infringing upon a famous band who inspired us. 
I recommend for some inspiration to peruse Richard P. Gabriel’s book, “Patterns of Software”, which, though out of print and only available as used paperback on Amazon for around USD$80, is now downloadable from Gabriel’s website. Gabriel, keynote speaker of last year’s ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, and Languages, talks about an idea which I find espescially applicable to the plight of modern Plone developers, called Habitability, and builds on the concepts of a legendary architect, Christopher Alexander, quoted from the Foreword:
“What was fascinating to me, indeed quite astonishing, was that in Gabriel’s essay I found out that a computer scientist, not known to me, and whom I had never met, seemed to understand more about what I had done and was trying to do in my own field than my own colleagues who are architects.”