Rob said:

Someone else said:

...

Rachel We recommended to the library that they release the software as "Open Source". That means that anyone else can download the software and run it up on their machine without paying either us or Horowhenua Library Trust a cent.

Rosalie Not just for the glory (though this is a world first)!

If that is that so, then I think your claim of a world first is a bit ambititious.

We've been giving away our school library software (Athenaeum Light) for 3 years now, over the internet. No strings. All passwords. Savvy users can modify the code, if they have the knowhow and tools. It is certainly different to what you have, but the basic concepts are the same.

I think the 'world first' was referring to the open source nature of the project see . It is indeed great to hear that other people doing Open Source libraryware. We at the New Zealand Digital Library (http://www.nzdl.org) have been producing Open Source for fully digital libraries since 1995. We deliberately target low end humanitarian and similar organisations, with support for many languages (including the right-to-left reading order and large character sets), platforms back to win 3.11 and no propriortry software needed. See http://www.gnu.org/ for a definition of what we mean when we say open source. While there's a difference between digital library software and library automation software (the former deals with electronic documents the later with physical documents), I imagine that there are many similarities. stuart -- stuart yeates <s.yeates@cs.waikato.ac.nz> aka `loam' "Oh, havoc," cried Pooh, as he let slip the heffalumps of war. X-no-archive:yes