ZDNet have a story today about a pretty big deployment of Zope that’s going to be happenning at RBS. The article discusses how open source is slowly moving up into the application layer, previously a place filled with mostly proprietary apps.

I’ve personally tried to use Zope before, but only the once. Maybe I was looking for the wrong thing, but I ended up disappointed and didn’t use it again. Obviously there’s a few people out there who have different views.

What Zope does seem to have is a large base of developers and contributors around it, which has given RBS somewhere to recruit a number of specialists from (I can personally testify that most recruitment agents don’t know a lot about the open source industry). So could the characteristics of the group of developers around a product actually be a factor for an organisation looking to deploy an open source platform?