Plone Foundation News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

It's been a busy summer for the Plone (news, site) project. In particular, they put out a call for Plone Improvement Proposals (PLIPs) for Plone 4. They also split the initial vision for Plone 4 into a more do-able Plone 4 for this year and a more far-reaching update for Plone 5 slated for next year.

Following the PLIP process, the Plone 4 Framework Team has polished off their list of what's to be included in this release.

As we've mentioned previously, the Plone (news, site) community has been in discussions over a slight change to licensing policy. No, Plone is not changing licenses. It's sticking with the GPL.

However, Plone is now also offering the option for those building Plone Framework Components to apply for permission to use a modified BSD license for their components instead of the GPL.

This move is primarily meant to make it easier for componentized Plone code to interact with Zope and Python projects without causing GPL violations. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis for components that:

• Are in the plone.* namespace, not the plone.app.* namespace.
• Don't have imports from GPL-licensed code.

The primary developer/maintainer must be willing to ensure the component won't acquire dependencies on GPL-licensed code.

For the official description of the new policy and associated FAQs, see the Plone Framework Components Relicensing Policy document.

Some might say that over the ten years since the Plone (news, site) project was founded, the Plone community has developed an organizational fetish. However, that fetish has served them well -- leading to 2 Packt Open Source CMS Awards, participation in events like the Google Summer of Code and a worldwide Python-powered following. Here's a look at where the Plone project is today.

In May 2004, the Plone Foundation was formed as a supporting organization for Plone, an open source web content management solution. They have finally achieved one of their key objectives — to have the Plone community at large take ownership of the “Plone” word in nearly all areas of the world.

In doing so, the open source community has set the bar just that much higher for what we all consider “open source”.