Owen Leonard <oleonard@myacpl.org> wrote:
I certainly hope PTFS will not release an update to Harley. I would hope their efforts are being put into integrating it into the real Koha instead.
A few days ago, at the Liblime Users Group meeting held at the ALA conference, customers were told that LibLime plans to merge Harley and LEK (Liblime Enterprise Koha) at some point in the future. I don't recall hearing any specific timeline for that. Liblime also displayed a policy document regarding code release of their software. I think they said it was on their website, but I can't find it right now. I just emailed them for a link or copy of it, but for now I'll give you a summary based on my memory of what was shown.. AIR, the policy says that sponsored software featureswill go through a testing cycle with the sponsoring organization, then will be released to other Liblime customers for six months. After that, the code will be released to the larger Koha world. As I understand it, most of the enhancements sponsored by one of the customer groups (the group sponsoring most of LEK features, I think) are currently contractually defined as a single project rather than individual enhancements. So until the full "bundle" of enhancements goes through the full process of testing and deployment to the other LEK customers, no part of it will be released. After the "Phase I" project is finished, which is scheduled for the end of 2010, then those enhancements will be released to other LEK users, so if there is a release of that code, it is unlikely to be prior to the middle or end of 2011. That date assumes that the project finishes on time. I believe the original date for the end of Phase one was summer, 2009, so this schedule may be overly optimistic. Since the "phase I" includes a large number of features, I asked in the meeting how long they thought it would take for those to be integrated into the official community version of Koha. The estimate I was given was four to five years. I must admit I don't really fully understand the process in which sponsored enhancements are integrated into the official Koha software. Is an evaluation done for sponsored features before they are integrated into the software? I would think the programmers involved in each release would want to evaluate them to see whether they in fact are improvements over the either the current software or whether another feature supplied by a different support vendor may accomplish the same functionality in a better way. If such evaluation is done, who does it? We have had at least one instance when we were told that a feature of official Koha would have to be sacrificed in order for a LEK feature to work correctly. I don't know whether that is going to be a common issue, but I assume that within the official Koha project, there is some decision-making protocol for deciding whether a new feature is worth more than the existing feature that it disables or worth integrating at all if there is an existing feature developed elsewhere that adds the same functionality. -- Stacy Pober Information Alchemist Manhattan College Library Riverdale, NY 10471 stacy.pober@manhattan.edu