"Having first challenged Microsoft, the open source movement is now taking on Sun, Oracle and stock market
highfliers like Vignette. This time the battle is not over operating systems, but free versus priced Web application
servers...."
"Zope and Midgard, two open source application servers aimed squarely at the same tasks undertaken by
Vignette's StoryServer or Sun's pair of products, have begun to win a substantial number of fans."
"Although both are open source in the true sense of the term the code can be inspected, freely modified and
redistributed without royalty surprisingly both Zope and Midgard were spawned by commercial projects, rather
than the academic or utilitarian efforts that gave rise to Linux and Apache. Zope is the product of Digital
Creations, a US firm that started giving Zope away in 1998, when New Jersey venture capitalist Verticality
Investment Group agreed that Zope then called Principia could only capture a small share of a market
dominated by firms with big marketing budgets."
