Dear all, It is a mistake to think about "free beer" and not "free speech". Koha is so complete that we must understand that to intall and customize it there are only two ways: ourself or someone that knows it. But with comercial software we have the same problem because we pay the license plus customization. If we choose Koha we have open souce wich can be adjusted. Otherwise we pay and wait always for a new release. Koha is so open that a lot of developments can be done with it. But to be stronger a large community is needed to cooperate and share such developments. After some years and with 3.0 I see such growing (emails keep being sent) that it can be spread around world. We is Portugal have a difficult mission because a large majority is already using some commercial software but I am trying to be an evangelist and creating a Koha community. If it succeeds sometime we help for free but other times we do some consultation on Library management and we are paid. Regards, Rafael António Citando paul POULAIN <paul.poulain@biblibre.com>:
Joe Atzberger a écrit :
I don't think it accurate to say that there are many people working on Koha for free.
Indeed, these stats bear that out: http://www.ohloh.net/p/1541/contributors
interesting stat, that proves the multiple origin of Koha : - me, laurenthdl & toins (BibLibre) - chris C (previously katipo, now catalyst) - owen (NPL) - kados, galen, atz, rych (LibLime) - acli - many others
In fact, if i'm not mistaken, the 2nd interesting point in this list is that the only contributors that were not support companies are : owen (and he's a unique case I think), acli, steve tonnesen, and wolfpack444 Apologizes if I'm wrong, but none of them (except owen, of course) are still active for years. I'm sure that, to the -notable- exception of owen, for 3 years, the 10 first committers are LibLimers and BibLibreros[*] ! (/me dunno how to count chris C., as he has been a liblimer partially during this period)
We see here a change in Koha model. You can think/find it's a shame, but I think that Koha is now too complex (from a functionnal point of view) to have ppl involved on a "spare time" contribution basis.
Learning koha internals + librarian terms + zebra + ... is not a small thing !
[*] ppl from BibLibre. BibLibre is hard enough to pronounce, BibLibrers is impossible ;-) so, we've choosen to be BibLibreros :D
-- Paul POULAIN http://www.biblibre.com Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
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