[Koha] PTFS Support for the Koha Community

[Wagner, Jane]

John Yokley asked me to post this for him; he doesn't regularly monitor this list but I do.  I'll pass on any comments or questions to John or to others here when needed.  Thanks.

        ***********

Paul - 

Yes you did misunderstand our intensions.  We will contribute the source code we develop to the community and if the proper protocol is to do that for our customers directly then that is what we will do.  Based on your note it seems that this process requires significant expertise and would be onerous to our customer.  We would gladly perform this task for them

        ***********

Jane Wagner
Library Systems Analyst
PTFS Inc.
Content Management and Library Solutions
6400 Goldsboro Road, Suite 200
Bethesda, MD  20817
(301) 654-8088 x 151
jwagner at ptfs.com


-----Original Message-----
From: koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of paul POULAIN
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 11:38 AM
Cc: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: Re: [Koha] PTFS Support for the Koha Community

Yokley, John a écrit :
>
> ** We also have a software development group well suited to support 
> Koha development.  I have been advised that there are community 
> concerns over code submission.  While we have not yet completed a Koha 
> development project, we fully intend to provide the source code to our 
> customers for submission to the community.
>
Hello John,

did I miunderstand : you plan to provide the source code to your 
customers and they will have to take care of submitting it to the 
community ?
If it's your choice, then you'll be GPL compliant, as the GPL just 
requires that (ie: provide the source code & give permission to 
redistribute)
If it's what you plan to do, your customers will go to a dead-end, as 
their specific code won't be in official Koha (I can't think even a 
second a librarian will submit git patches ! Maybe US librarians are 
different from French librarians, but not that much !!!).
Thus, for future release, they'll have to do the job again -or have to 
pay you[1] to do it- Not very interesting for the users ! At BibLibre, 
it's something we have done only once in 6 years, and the library that 
wanted that regrets his decision (as the move from 2.2 to 3.0 will be 
very expensive, and probably delayed to 2010 !)

Also note that, due to Koha technical architecture, you can't deploy 
Koha without providing the source code (thanks Perl language) !

[1] you or someone else. But frankly, this will be a technical pain for 
the company doing it if it was not the company doing the 1st version.

-- 
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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