Amy, et. al.,
There was a recent post that asked for reasons to form a foundation. Here are a few that we think are important:
Thank you for clarifying. I have a few more questions, as I try to clarify for myself, and hopefully for others, too, why we might need a Koha foundation.
1. One organization that is granted the right to hold all Koha assets
Fair enough. However, why a foundation instead of the HLT, or any of the other options discussed last year? I asked some of the folks in NZ, and they confirmed that HLT is legally permitted to hold assets.
2. A single Website for Koha
Could you clarify the relationship between a new foundation and the Koha website? There's the koha-community.org website which is the official website for Koha, and the koha.org website which, as I understood it, is run my PTFS/LibLime. Are there other websites, too, that are not controlled by anyone in the Koha community?
3. An end to further or future controversy or actions regarding name changes, copyrights, trademark issues domain names and any possible enforcement of the use/misuse of any of these assets.
Definitely a good thing. Any chance you could clarify how a new foundation would prevent controversy? Open source ultimately is dependent on voluntary association, and everyone agreeing to follow the same set of rules. Having a foundation doesn't mean that in 2012 someone couldn't come in and say "I don't like your rules, and I'm trademarking the word 'Koha' in Japan."
4. A better way to manage and channel the development efforts all involved (corporate and independent) for the benefit of one community version.
5. New governance that will help manage the growth of Koha in a way such
I am not sure that I understand what you're getting at here. Based on my understanding, however, it seems to me that the solution here is transparency. I would speculate that most developers are working on the projects that *they* want to work on, either for their own use or for their clients' use. To take a concrete example: I completely understand why an "image library" feature is not a high priority for the Koha project. If someone wants a digital library, he or she is probably better off installing a digital library system like Greenstone or Kete (full disclosure: I've used neither). On a general level, I agree with that entirely. Koha is an awesome ILS, let projects produce awesome digital libraries. On a specific level, however, this is a feature that I needed. So I developed it, and will continue to develop features that I need, whether they are destined for mainstream Koha or not, and make them all available in my public repository for anyone else who can use them. That said, I certainly hope that all the features I develop are incorporated into mainstream Koha, because rebasing my code every few days is a nuisance. My development efforts will continue much in this vein, regardless of the existence or non-existence of a foundation. that corporate and independent entities will unite and both contribute time. Corporate entities will assist in funding the foundation until it is self supporting. This seems very similar to point 4. Putting that aside, don't both corporate and independent entities contribute time to the Koha project right now?
6. Full time paid staff that concentrate 100% of their time on the product to coordinate and accelerate the pace of development preventing serious delays in future releases as has been experienced since the release of version 3.0.
This seems clear enough, although I am not quite sure why a new foundation is required for this. If I had a lot of spare change lying around, couldn't I hire a full-time developer to work on Koha? Thanks for clarifying. Regards, Jared Camins-Esakov P.S. Should anyone actually have a use for the image library feature I used in my example, it's available in my public repo at http://github.com/jcamins/koha/tree/image_library -- Jared Camins-Esakov Freelance bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC (phone) +1 (917) 727-3445 (e-mail) jcamins@cpbibliography.com (web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/