Salvete!
I respectfully disagree. It's like a doctor saying that you'll need your leg amputated before trying physical therapy. Sigh ... I can't even count how many ways it's NOT like that.
That sigh and those caps typify the sort of negative community attitude that I'd rather avoid. I'm trying to offer constructive criticism and I'm being met time and time with condescension.
You seem to be aiming a lot of your frustration at LibLime. I'd argue that we've done a very good job promoting just the spirit you're saying the community is known for. I think we've specifically planned for that, and have aired topics for discussion to plan for just that type of project. I wonder why you think we have a lack of planning, from my POV, it's quite the opposite.
You asked me to be specific, so I was. I think you all did a better job initially than now. I remember a time when there was one day a week where LibLime devoted itself to the community gratis. It wasn't carried on very long, but the gesture was important. Even if the interval were changed to be once a month or once a quarter, at least it would be there. What I've not seen, that I think we ought to see the project do, would be for a friendly (yes friendly!) coding competition. They happen all the time on different projects. People really get into them and stuff gets done. It could be like coding field day, and we could fabricate some sort of ridiculous looking Kiwi trophy. Let's put the fun back into the project.
This is over on the other thread, where this started, before you changed threads on me, so I'll paste it in again:
I changed threads since this doesn't much have to do with acquisitions and does have to do with community feedback.
My perception is that you're coming at this from the perspective of a library who's downloaded Koha on your own, and who's been active in the community with respect to documentation and help on the various mailing lists, right? ie, you haven't signed up for support with a Koha company, and you haven't contributed or sponsored any code, right? BTW: I think that's just great, hats off to you for your continued involvement and community support, it's much appreciated and the community wouldn't be the same without you and others like you.
I didn't need support at a premium when my husband was more than capable of providing me with technical support. He's come close on a couple of occasions to contributing code. As it was, as the years went by and I spoke with Chris and Paul and others, I felt like my knowledge base was growing large enough to attempt an installation on my own. I'm still toying with the idea of taking a PERL class. This is like fundraising, Josh. Things grow over months and years.
However, things get tricky because as valuable as all those activities you do are, they don't do help motivate Koha developers to change add or improve code. This isn't the kind of open source community where
I disagree heavily with this. I've had a number of conversations over the years off list with developers who took what I said, asked further probing questions, and would mock up a feature. You did this yourself with the MARC export feature over a lunch break. How much free testing with specific feedback on beta 3 did I provide you? The only reason I didn't do more then was that I felt insignificant.
we've got a bunch of volunteers contributing code out of the goodness of their hearts ... over 90% of Koha is done by programmers who work on Koha as a full time job (or two) to put meals on the table.
I'm not sure how true this is anymore. It's a lot larger project now than it was a few years ago. Those same programmers that are putting meals on the table have also put free code back in. The list of the top contributors offers an interesting testimony over time.
Currently, the margins on Koha development are so low, many of us have to supplement our Koha development work with other services just to make ends meet.
And this, from another of your emails, is relevant here:
The reason is that none of the developers in this community get paid a salary to work on it. That's the bottom line. The librarians get paid a salary to use the system, and presumably that gives people like you some time to spend doing great stuff like documentation, etc. But us developers don't have salaries outside of our Koha work, so we only have time to work on stuff we're paid for, it's as simple as that.
My salary at Hinsdale was about $15,000. That was a raise from my predecessors. I was a lucky rural Librarian at that rate, too. I worked there for many reasons, one of them being that I didn't think it was fair that doctors and teachers could participate in programmes that situated them in either rural or urban settings of need and that there was no such programme for Librarians. There is more to life and Koha than money.
So from that perspective, the perspective of a starving developer, what are your thoughts on how we developers can both keep our stomachs full (not to mention mortgages, etc.), and fulfill the needs of users like yourself? Some kind of voting mechanism that gives a weight of voting based on dollars, and a commitment from the development community to tap that resource for sponsoring voted-upon features? It's a very interesting problem, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we might solve it.
There's a much wider pool at play though. I mentioned earlier in the email that I'd like to see a return to a free programming and development day where any user could show up in IRC or elsewhere and have the ear of a developer. If folks did this in rotation, it would be less of a stress on everyone. Voting by dollar is a terrible system. The current financial state of affairs points that out. That's how one ends up with fragmented feature laden code that doesn't have stability since it's not sexy to fund rewrites. I don't want to see that happen here. Why isn't there a rating system for users built into the roadmap? Why can't we prioritise features that aren't sponsored as a community that way the stuff that we want to see get done is seen to after the paid projects if that's going to be the way you approach things? We need to be thinking about the large picture. I think it's financially wasteful to *not* think about the big future trends as far in advance as possible. I'd also point out that you seem to be falling in the pitfall of assuming that what someone pays for isn't of interest to other users and vice versa. Also that people that aren't currently donating money or code to the project won't ever donate money in future. I feel like every contribution is meaningful and ought to be encourage instead of imposing a caste system of developer and non developer or paying client and riff raff. Cheers, Brooke
... over 90% of Koha is done by programmers who work on Koha as a full time job (or two) to put meals on the table.
I'm not sure how true this is anymore. It's a lot larger project now than it was a few years ago. Those same programmers that are putting meals on the table have also put free code back in. The list of the top contributors offers an interesting testimony over time.
The Koha project is larger now in large part due to the growth of Koha support companies like Liblime and BibLibre. As more libraries move to Koha with those companies' help, we're gaining contributors from those libraries. Those contributors, like me, are doing work that is both paid work and contribution: My library pays me to work on Koha (among other things), and the work I do is contributed to the project. But essentially we're working on Koha as part of a paying job. I don't think it accurate to say that there are many people working on Koha for free. -- Owen -- Web Developer Athens County Public Libraries http://www.myacpl.org
I don't think it accurate to say that there are many people working on Koha for free.
Indeed, these stats bear that out: http://www.ohloh.net/p/1541/contributors
Joe Atzberger a écrit :
I don't think it accurate to say that there are many people working on Koha for free.
Indeed, these stats bear that out: http://www.ohloh.net/p/1541/contributors
interesting stat, that proves the multiple origin of Koha : - me, laurenthdl & toins (BibLibre) - chris C (previously katipo, now catalyst) - owen (NPL) - kados, galen, atz, rych (LibLime) - acli - many others In fact, if i'm not mistaken, the 2nd interesting point in this list is that the only contributors that were not support companies are : owen (and he's a unique case I think), acli, steve tonnesen, and wolfpack444 Apologizes if I'm wrong, but none of them (except owen, of course) are still active for years. I'm sure that, to the -notable- exception of owen, for 3 years, the 10 first committers are LibLimers and BibLibreros[*] ! (/me dunno how to count chris C., as he has been a liblimer partially during this period) We see here a change in Koha model. You can think/find it's a shame, but I think that Koha is now too complex (from a functionnal point of view) to have ppl involved on a "spare time" contribution basis. Learning koha internals + librarian terms + zebra + ... is not a small thing ! [*] ppl from BibLibre. BibLibre is hard enough to pronounce, BibLibrers is impossible ;-) so, we've choosen to be BibLibreros :D -- Paul POULAIN http://www.biblibre.com Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
Joe Atzberger a écrit :
I don't think it accurate to say that there are many people working on Koha for free.
Indeed, these stats bear that out: http://www.ohloh.net/p/1541/contributors
interesting stat, that proves the multiple origin of Koha : - me, laurenthdl & toins (BibLibre) - chris C (previously katipo, now catalyst) - owen (NPL) - kados, galen, atz, rych (LibLime) - acli - many others
In fact, if i'm not mistaken, the 2nd interesting point in this list is that the only contributors that were not support companies are : owen (and he's a unique case I think), acli, steve tonnesen, and wolfpack444 Apologizes if I'm wrong, but none of them (except owen, of course) are still active for years. I'm sure that, to the -notable- exception of owen, for 3 years, the 10 first committers are LibLimers and BibLibreros[*] ! (/me dunno how to count chris C., as he has been a liblimer partially during this period)
We see here a change in Koha model. You can think/find it's a shame, but I think that Koha is now too complex (from a functionnal point of view) to have ppl involved on a "spare time" contribution basis.
Learning koha internals + librarian terms + zebra + ... is not a small thing ! Very interesting analysis Paul. I wonder if it's possible to calculate
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 12:51 PM, paul POULAIN <paul.poulain@biblibre.com> wrote: the approx. number of lines of code contributed by people not obtaining a salary from either a library or a support organization supporting Koha. They'd be the true base of 'volunteers', since everyone else would represent people who were getting paid one way or another to work on the project, right? Probably a hard figure to come up with, but I suspect it'd be pretty low relative to the lines of code contributed by either librarian workers and support companies. 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
Very interesting analysis Paul. I wonder if it's possible to calculate the approx. number of lines of code contributed by people not obtaining a salary from either a library or a support organization supporting Koha. They'd be the true base of 'volunteers', since everyone else would represent people who were getting paid one way or another to work on the project, right? Probably a hard figure to come up with, but I suspect it'd be pretty low relative to the lines of code contributed by either librarian workers and support companies.
As i said in the reply to Paul, this would be really hard to come up with. If I get paid for 20 hours work a week on koha, but do about 40, plus the other 20 paid work. How do we split this up. I think its important to remember that people can be both paid and unpaid workers on Koha at the same time. I havent been paid 1 cent since March this year for Koha work. Id like to think I was still doing useful work for the community. Heck ive even submitted a patch or 2 since then :-) Chris
Joshua Ferraro a écrit :
Learning koha internals + librarian terms + zebra + ... is not a small thing !
Very interesting analysis Paul. I wonder if it's possible to calculate the approx. number of lines of code contributed by people not obtaining a salary from either a library or a support organization supporting Koha. They'd be the true base of 'volunteers', since everyone else would represent people who were getting paid one way or another to work on the project, right? Probably a hard figure to come up with, but I suspect it'd be pretty low relative to the lines of code contributed by either librarian workers and support companies.
I think it's impossible, and it would not be meaningfull anyway. Let me explain what I did between 2002 and 2007 : I (with hdl since 2004) have invested all my non-paid time into Koha. In fact, during those years, we just had enough incomes for 2, didn't search more money, didn't wanted to grow. I think I could say that half of our time was dedicated to hacking Koha without "obtaining a salary from either a library or a support organization". That's almost impossible for me to separate what was sponsored by a library from what was "self-sponsored" / "self-involvement". In fact, for 5 years, I did not charge what I should have, but what I needed. Now that we have founded BibLibre (we are 8), we try to continue this way. We will publish on http://www.biblibre.com/blog, in the next days, a counter of all those actions. That represent something like 15%-2°% or our time. Cheers -- Paul POULAIN http://www.biblibre.com Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
Hello, i am trying a Koha 3 install on Ubuntu Hardy, and completed the regular installation steps. Once i login to the webinstaller and choose "es-ES" as the locale, the next screen is blank. To investigate further, i tried: choosing a regular "en" locale on the first screen, the second screen comes up fine with "All dependencies installed" and a 'next button. This also works with another arbitrary locale such as "ar-Arab" What could be the issue here? regards, krishnan Cricket on your mind? Visit the ultimate cricket website. Enter http://beta.cricket.yahoo.com
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 6:51 AM, paul POULAIN <paul.poulain@biblibre.com> wrote:
Joe Atzberger a écrit :
I don't think it accurate to say that there are many people working on Koha for free.
Indeed, these stats bear that out: http://www.ohloh.net/p/1541/contributors
interesting stat, that proves the multiple origin of Koha : - me, laurenthdl & toins (BibLibre) - chris C (previously katipo, now catalyst) - owen (NPL) - kados, galen, atz, rych (LibLime) - acli - many others
In fact, if i'm not mistaken, the 2nd interesting point in this list is that the only contributors that were not support companies are : owen (and he's a unique case I think), acli, steve tonnesen, and wolfpack444
Theres a lot more than that. The whole C4::Context module was done by arensberger. arensb 163 commits
Apologizes if I'm wrong, but none of them (except owen, of course) are still active for years.
This is mostly true.
I'm sure that, to the -notable- exception of owen, for 3 years, the 10 first committers are LibLimers and BibLibreros[*] ! (/me dunno how to count chris C., as he has been a liblimer partially during this period)
And done plenty outside work time. Im sure this is the case for you, HDL, lots of the liblimers as well. A salary only covers a certain number of hours a week. I always worked on Koha more than those hours. So you can't count all of those paid for. Speaking only for myself, I have worked more unpaid hours on Koha than I have paid ones. I bet this is the case for others also.
We see here a change in Koha model. You can think/find it's a shame, but I think that Koha is now too complex (from a functionnal point of view) to have ppl involved on a "spare time" contribution basis.
Learning koha internals + librarian terms + zebra + ... is not a small thing !
ANd this is a shame, because some of the biggest advances we have gotten (C4::Context originally) have come from spare time programmers. Or web based Circulation from Steve Tonnessen who was paid to run school libraries, not code for Koha. Chris
ANd this is a shame, because some of the biggest advances we have gotten (C4::Context originally) have come from spare time programmers. Or web based Circulation from Steve Tonnessen who was paid to run school libraries, not code for Koha.
Good point. Koha being an open source project need to stay 'open' to the outside world, and let new ideas and innovation blowing down into Koha. Complexity must be avoided as far of possible for this reason. In order to facilitate valuable contributions. Otherwise, like some other ILS, proprietary (evil!) ILS, Koha will dry up on its own. -- Frédéric
Chris Cormack a écrit :
Theres a lot more than that. The whole C4::Context module was done by arensberger. arensb 163 commits
Right, I just counted the 10 first. In fact, I think we should/could separate 2 things : - historical of Koha - snapshot of Koha Let me explain : Oloho displays 8 years of commits. We can see that we have a large amount of contributors. http://git.koha.org/gitstat/chart.php can display recent monthly code submission. The differences are interesting I think. For the last 6 months, we have the following domains : LibLime, BibLibre, myacpl, tamil, gmail, washk12, hclibrary, bigballofwax, ens-lyon, phonecoop That's 10 differents organisations (note i've ignored metavore, as it's LibLime. gmail I think it's Kyle, although not sure) on the other side : if you count the number of commits, you'll get : LibLime : 270 BibLibre : 79 myacpl : 74 washk12 : 24 bigballofwax : 12 All others cumulated : 19 total : 478 commits percentages : LibLime 56%, BibLibre 17%, myacpl : 16%, washk : 5%, bigballofwax : 2.5%, others : 4% So the question : is Koha "rich of a large number of commiters (10 differents organisations in the last 6 months)", or "heavily depending on 3 major contributors (LibLime, BibLibre, myacpl)" ? Note : those numbers don't display the RMaint role hdl is endorsing for 3.0.x He has validated a lot of patches (250) for 3.0.x, but they are not counted here (95% of the patches applied on main and 3.0.x, that would be a duplicate) another interesting stats, that I haven't, could be the number of lines of a given version written by each contributor. Something like "there are 100 000 lines of code in koha 3.0 as of dec 2008. X coming from LibLime, Y coming from BibLibre, Z coming from Katipo, ..." I'm sure the results would be much differents (with my/BibLibre contributions being more important, and katipo one much more). In my feeling, that would be something like 25% for each me/LibLime/katipo, and 25% for all others. but that's just a feeling, and I would be very pleased to have numbers ! note that those numbers would be false anyway, as someone commiting just a reindented script could be counted as author, which is obviously wrong ! I think the % is impossible to have. We just can count the number of commits (oloho), and the "snapshot" at a given date (git.koha.org) As a conclusion : none of us should forget the other number : Is LibLime proud to be the main commiter this year ? It's fair, but they must not forget that they have got a 6-7years old code when they started to commit heavily. Katipo or me is proud to be the author of version 1 / 2 ? It's fair, but we must not forget that those days the vitality of Koha is not coming mainly from us. Those are 2 steps of the same piece, and it would not be what it is without the 2 ! Developpers & libraries can be thanked as well : Katipo would not have written koha 1.0 without HLT, I would not have been involved in Koha without my catholic community (that asked me to find a free software for their library), and LibLime wouldn't have existed if NPL had not choosen it in 2004 (joshua used to work at NPL) /me endorse the role of the wise man ;-) -- Paul POULAIN http://www.biblibre.com Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
Dear all, It is a mistake to think about "free beer" and not "free speech". Koha is so complete that we must understand that to intall and customize it there are only two ways: ourself or someone that knows it. But with comercial software we have the same problem because we pay the license plus customization. If we choose Koha we have open souce wich can be adjusted. Otherwise we pay and wait always for a new release. Koha is so open that a lot of developments can be done with it. But to be stronger a large community is needed to cooperate and share such developments. After some years and with 3.0 I see such growing (emails keep being sent) that it can be spread around world. We is Portugal have a difficult mission because a large majority is already using some commercial software but I am trying to be an evangelist and creating a Koha community. If it succeeds sometime we help for free but other times we do some consultation on Library management and we are paid. Regards, Rafael António Citando paul POULAIN <paul.poulain@biblibre.com>:
Joe Atzberger a écrit :
I don't think it accurate to say that there are many people working on Koha for free.
Indeed, these stats bear that out: http://www.ohloh.net/p/1541/contributors
interesting stat, that proves the multiple origin of Koha : - me, laurenthdl & toins (BibLibre) - chris C (previously katipo, now catalyst) - owen (NPL) - kados, galen, atz, rych (LibLime) - acli - many others
In fact, if i'm not mistaken, the 2nd interesting point in this list is that the only contributors that were not support companies are : owen (and he's a unique case I think), acli, steve tonnesen, and wolfpack444 Apologizes if I'm wrong, but none of them (except owen, of course) are still active for years. I'm sure that, to the -notable- exception of owen, for 3 years, the 10 first committers are LibLimers and BibLibreros[*] ! (/me dunno how to count chris C., as he has been a liblimer partially during this period)
We see here a change in Koha model. You can think/find it's a shame, but I think that Koha is now too complex (from a functionnal point of view) to have ppl involved on a "spare time" contribution basis.
Learning koha internals + librarian terms + zebra + ... is not a small thing !
[*] ppl from BibLibre. BibLibre is hard enough to pronounce, BibLibrers is impossible ;-) so, we've choosen to be BibLibreros :D
-- Paul POULAIN http://www.biblibre.com Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
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participants (10)
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BWS Johnson -
Chris Cormack -
Frederic Demians -
Joe Atzberger -
Joshua Ferraro -
Krishnan M -
Mason James -
Owen Leonard -
paul POULAIN -
rafael.antonio＠sapo.pt