Hi folks, I would like to further clarify LibLime's recent announcement about the LibLime Enterprise Koha platform and its implications for the greater Koha community, as well as LibLime customers. First, we at LibLime apologize for what may have seemed like a surprise announcement. We have been working hard on creating a business model that will both ensure the success of our customers and the long-term viability of Koha. We hope that the discussion below in Q & A format will help promote better understanding about what we are doing, and that we can all move forward, wishing each other well. Q: Is LibLime Enterprise Koha a 'Fork' of Koha? A: LibLime Enterprise Koha is not a 'fork' of Koha. LibLime Enterprise Koha is a set of deployment and development procedures that allows us to provide our customers with ongoing updates to Koha on a realistic schedule. This is a change in process for LibLime, but not a change in philosophy. Prior to this change, our development process began with contribution to the Koha community, often before a set of patches was even approved by the sponsoring customer. This real-time contribution process created enormous overhead, especially given the volume of development that LibLime is involved in (which historically and currently represents an order of magnitude more than the entire rest of the community combined). Our new approach moves the contribution phase of development to the end of the cycle, which allows us and our customers adequate time to vet the functionality and to ensure that it integrates seamlessly with the public Koha repository. Q: Has LibLime withdrawn from the Koha community? A: LibLime has not withdrawn, and does not intend to withdraw, from the Koha community. LibLime has invested significant resources into Koha development and community infrastructure and will continue to do so. LibLime will publish our LibLime Enterprise Koha enhancements. The integration process with the main Koha code repository will be a seamless one. We currently support dozens of libraries running on official Koha versions on their own servers and it is critical to their success that they benefit from the LibLime customer-sponsored contributions. Q: Is LibLime Enterprise Koha truly open source both in the letter and spirit of the movement? A: Our announcements are clear on this issue. From the press release "Just to make one thing crystal clear: All of LibLime's development efforts will be available to the library community under an open-source license," ... "These are process changes, not philosophical changes. As the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, LibLime is 100% committed to the open-source movement." Q: Why has LibLime chosen to deploy LibLime Enterprise Koha as a Software as a Service offering only? A: Our new cloud-computing platform makes the process of developing, upgrading and maintaining Koha a seamless and fully-automated process. We have not yet developed the mechanism for managing remote Koha installations outside of our platform. The requirements for keeping these off-platform installations in sync with the rest of our install base is not feasible. We are 100% committed to continuing to upgrade our Appliance customers(non-hosted) and to keep them in step with the latest community-released versions of Koha. Thanks for your understanding. Sincerely, Josh -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE CEO migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS