If the Development Exchange has not worked as well as hoped, perhaps it's because a critical mass was lacking? I think we would have been very interested to learn more about the project. The transparency of price quotes is above my pay grade unfortunately. But seeing as there's a ton of transparency in at least certain areas of the software development world -- guru.com, rentacoder.com, scriptlance.com, etc. -- perhaps it's not all that out of the question. Certainly, it would seem to be gibe well w/ the whole open source ethos. Just my 2c. Cab Vinton, Director Sanbornton Public Library Sanbornton, NH On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Joshua Ferraro <jmf@liblime.com> wrote:
In general I like this idea, and LibLime has implemented a small-scale experiment we call the LibLime Development Exchange that attempts to provide this kind of transparency to our customers.
However, one problem with doing this as the Koha project, is that price tags for enhancements aren't generally considered transparent by the companies providing support on Koha. I think most of the Koha companies (correct me if I'm wrong folks) would consider unfinished specifications and quotes for those specifications to be private. If you don't understand why that tends to be the case, you likely haven't ever managed a services company :-).
Another problem, and we've seen this happen on the LibLime Development Exchange, is that there is really very little overlap between what one library wants and another library wants. It's really surprising, but unfortunately true. So there is less opportunity for co-sponsorship than you might think.
Cheers,
-- 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