[Koha] Liblime, Koha, BibLibre and FLOSS

[Colin Campbell]

On 10/22/2009 08:53 PM, Kyle Hall wrote:
> Maybe access to the source of in-house modifications should be a
> requirement for being a listed vendor on the site? We may not be able to
> alter the terms of the GPL, but we can decide the terms of koha.org
One thing recent events have shown is that as a community we cannot 
guarantee that a vendor will will act tomorrow as they act today. Or 
that a large vendor may not suddenly decide to bring its weight into the 
library market (think microsoft as a worst case, or maybe the company 
that does the payroll and backoffice for your institution wants to add a 
library package addon). As such we have to depend on the licensing terms 
of the software we rely on to do our work and the freedoms, rights and 
responsibilities that they grant us.
   It's not a problem that is peculiar to this project and we can 
benefit from the work of the greater free software community. We should 
seriously be looking at whether we should alter the licence for future 
contributions to Koha (and I think we may well find ourselves at the 
beginning of a period of major growth now). The Free Software Foundation 
already promote a licence that closes the Software as a Service gap, see 
the annoucement here:
  > http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2007-03-29-gplv3-saas
and the actual license here
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

whether this is the way to go or not the freedoms in the GPL have
been a good foundation to the growth of this community. I think we
need to ensure they are carried on to future users and it is a subject
we need to give serious attention to

Colin


-- 
Colin Campbell
Software Engineer, PTFS Europe Limited
Content Management and Library Solutions
+44 (0) 208 366 1295 (phone)
+44 (0) 7759 633626  (mobile)
colin.campbell at ptfs-europe.com
skype: colin_campbell2

http://www.ptfs-europe.com