[Koha] Support for Koha

[MJ Ray]

Joshua Ferraro <jmf at liblime.com> wrote: [...]
> Since this has turned into an attack on LibLime I feel I must state
> for the record that, as far as I know, LibLime is the ONLY vendor that
> has historically contributed 100% of our code as soon as it was
> approved by a customer's quality assurance testing.

Probably that's correct because I think several vendors are publishing
100% of their code as soon as it gets past their own QA!

I think software.coop is the only Koha vendor whose governing rules
commit us "to inform the general public - particularly young people
and opinion leaders - about the nature and benefits" of Koha's
development model; and "work for the sustainable development" of our
communities. Yes, that's really in our company mission, as submitted
to our national registration bodies.  In short, we're a good
cooperative.  In our last evaluation (2008), we were achieving 69% of
these goals and we're improving each year.

> As far as I know,
> every other vendor in the Koha community intentionally withholds
> customizations that are only available to their customers, or don't
> take the time to fully integrate their code into the mainline Koha
> codebase (understandably so, as this either gives them a competitive
> edge, or they simply don't have time to contribute it).

Well, software.coop forked 3.0 many moons ago because we made the
mistake of promising the announced 3.0 release date plus a few months
slack to a customer, so we needed to stabilise it quickly and
disagreed on some principles. We've been fairly open about that and we
will reconcile that fork.  It looks like the features will merge into
3.2 and not 3.0 now.

Even though it's not on the mainline, the code is normally available,
although we've had a few services die on us and not really publicised
it - so now we plan to introduce git.software.coop for public hosting
but I don't know when we'll get resources for that.

There's also some development code which isn't public because early
drafts contain authentication details and things like that which we
can't publish, but it's normally described in enhancement bug reports
on bugs.koha.org - unlike a vendor whose apparently-similar work we
only learnt about when someone tweeted from their conference sessions!

> [...] So, companies who
> host Koha in a software as a service environment are not obligated to
> redistribute their code to the community (which is why so many Koha
> vendors are able to withhold their code).

Yes, I feel anyone commissioning Koha hosting should probably add a
clause that requires they get a copy of the exact version used in the
hosting and access to all their data and configuration files on
demand, so they can host it on their own server if they want.  Maybe
we should add a "download all" link in the Tools section and mention
it in the official manual?  If that's missing/disabled, users will
know to start plotting an escape.

[...]
> Also, for the record, as requested by LibLime's customers, the LibLime
> Users's Group list is a closed list, so messages sent to that list
> should NOT be forwarded to the general Koha list, or anywhere else.

Yes, that's not good.  On lists I run, I change the standard footer to
something which mentions restrictions like that, but it's hard to put
these back in private once published.

Best wishes,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)  LMS developer and webmaster at     | software
www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk        |  .... co
IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html |  .... op