On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Lenora Oftedahl <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:OFTL@critfc.org">OFTL@critfc.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
The new site is lovely.<br>
However, the site really needs to be vendor independent or small libraries<br>
are going to turn away under the impression that they need to use a vendor<br>
to install and use the software.<br>
<br>
As for contributions, I think Eric is correct that contributions by a<br>
paid company should be attributed to the people who actually paid for<br>
them. Perhaps something that states the contribution was paid for by ...<br>
and programming/development by ...<br></blockquote></div><br>I sent a reply earlier in the thread that went into moderation and I'm not sure it ever got through. So at the risk of repeating myself (and perhaps appearing in reverse order), I'll reply to this point.<br>
<br>Citing feature sponsors, while useful and appropriate for a page about Koha history, or in the "About" section of the software, has nothing to do with the "for pay" support page. Let's be sure to keep these ideas separate. The desire to have this attribution is not a proposal to modify the "for pay" page: we'd be talking about building or augmenting a different page/resource (fine by me, btw). I'll explain why. <br>
<br>The companies listed are those with demonstrable Koha expertise who are available for hire. Having sponsored a feature does not make the sponsor any more capable of providing Koha support, or even remotely interested in entering into financial relationships with users around the world to do so. The correlation is more likely to be precisely the opposite: that people who sponsored a feature specifically DO NOT want to provide Koha "for pay" support or development to others, since they themselves were paying another party for that service. <br>
<br>And that makes sense to me. Sponsors typically have their own real libraries to run, and even assuming they wanted to, most municipal and academic institutions would be prevented from performing commercial developer/host functions (at least, not without a lengthy legal review process). So that's why the "for pay" page is concerned with feature *implementation*, not sponsorship: because it's readers are interested in available expertise.<br>
<br>-- <br>Joe Atzberger<br>LibLime - Open Source Library Solutions<br>