Goodbye eZ Components … welcome Zeta Components!

As some of you might already have noted: Kore and me left eZ Systems by early April. With us, the rest of the eZ Components development has left the company. However, this is by far not the end of eZ Components, instead it is the beginning of a new era.

The latest core development team - that is Derick, Kore, Sebastian and me - and eZ Systems have just proposed eZ Components to become a project of the Apache Software Foundation under the new name Zeta Components.

Striving for a new home in the Apache Software Foundation is a huge and important step for the project. On the one hand, we want to ensure that the development of Zeta Components continues as it has been done for the past 5 years: With a clear focus on code and documentation quality, backwards compatibility, flexibility and extensibility. On the other we want to open up the project and to make it independent from any company. To communicate these goals clearly, we jointly decided to give the project a new name.

This does of course neither mean that eZ Systems will stop using the components, nor that they will stop contributing to it. They will still continue to integrate the library into eZ Publish and to support the project wherever possible. With the goal of giving the Zeta project a new home in the Apache Software Foundation, eZ Systems opens up the project and aims to grow its community.

From eZ's point of view, the components are one of the highest quality PHP libraries available. eZ is strongly willing to be part of its future development, and wants the project to be widely recognized and used, as it deserves. With this new organization, responsibility, momentum and governance of the project, will be way clearer. eZ will be able to be part of the community and to focus its contributions to the project on aspects that directly relate to eZ's products. In addition, the whole Zeta Components project team will not be restricted by this scope and will be able to explore many other directions.

We are all looking forward to your involvement in this new project movement and hope that the Apache Software Foundation will accept Zeta for incubation and later on as a top level Apache project. We invite everyone to participate in the discussion of the Zeta proposal to ASF and to push this great project further.

I'm really glad that we managed to arrange this step together with eZ Systems and that we keep working on the project we poured so much dedication into, now as open source contributors. Beside that, I'm happy to announce that Kore and myself are in the process of founding our own company. While our main focus will be on consulting and training around the PHP quality life cycle, we will also offer expert support, consulting, training and paid development for Zeta.

My thanks go to eZ Systems for their willingness to donate the project to the ASF, to my fellow team members for supporting this process and of course to the community that will hopefully stay with us and grow rapidly. I'm very much looking into a great future …

Read more about this in Kores blog post about the spin off, my blog post about leaving eZ Systems and the proposal in the Apache Incubator wiki.