I wrote:

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.

Several people have misinterpreted the passage above, and I apologize for any confusion my remarks have caused. First, just to clarify, the estimate of "four or five years" was clearly NOT given as the time it would take for PTFS/Liblime to release to code. As I understand it, in the new policy the enhancements are first tested by the sponsoring customers, and then the new features are used by the other Liblime customers using that 'flavor' of Koha (i.e. either Harley or LEK) for six months. After six months of use by Liblime customers, the code for these features is then released to the larger Koha community, assuming that the sponsor agrees to the release of the code at all. Since the code is developed as a work for hire, the customer can decline to release the code at all. In the meeting, I asked how long they estimated it would take for the official Koha community to integrate the code once it had been released. First one Liblime staffer said two or three years and then another one said, 'more like four or five years'. This was where the figure of "4 or 5 years" came up - they clearly did not mean that they were going to withhold the code for that long. So the 4 or 5 year figure was never given as the delay before the code was released. It was given as the amount of time it would take for the Koha community to integrate the large amount of code from LEK's "phase I" development into the official version of Koha. But wait - there's more. Today, someone from Liblime contacted me to explain that the estimate of 4 or 5 years as the time for the community to integrate such a large amount of code was a "humorous ad lib comment" rather than a serious answer to my question I am not a programmer, and thus lacked the context to understand that this was a joke. I don't know if the initial "2 or 3 years" answer to my question was also a humorous remark. In any case, they really never did say or imply that they were going to hold onto the code for four or five years, and I'm sorry if this was not clear in my original post. -- Stacy Pober Information Alchemist Riverdale, NY 10471 stacy.pober@manhattan.edu