[Koha] LibLime Enterprise Koha Q&A

[Joshua Ferraro]

Hi folks,

I would like to further clarify LibLime's recent announcement about
the LibLime Enterprise Koha platform and its implications for the
greater Koha community, as well as LibLime customers.

First, we at LibLime apologize for what may have seemed like a
surprise announcement. We have been working hard on creating a
business model that will both ensure the success of our customers and
the long-term viability of Koha.  We hope that the discussion below in
Q & A format will help promote better understanding about what we are
doing, and that we can all move forward, wishing each other well.

Q: Is LibLime Enterprise Koha a 'Fork' of Koha?

A: LibLime Enterprise Koha is not a 'fork' of Koha. LibLime Enterprise
Koha is a set of deployment and development procedures that allows us
to provide our customers with ongoing updates to Koha on a realistic
schedule.

This is a change in process for LibLime, but not a change in
philosophy. Prior to this change, our development process began with
contribution to the Koha community, often before a set of patches was
even approved by the sponsoring customer. This real-time contribution
process created enormous overhead, especially given the volume of
development that LibLime is involved in (which historically and
currently represents an order of magnitude more than the entire rest
of the community combined). Our new approach moves the contribution
phase of development to the end of the cycle, which allows us and our
customers adequate time to vet the functionality and to ensure that it
integrates seamlessly with the public Koha repository.

Q: Has LibLime withdrawn from the Koha community?

A: LibLime has not withdrawn, and does not intend to withdraw, from
the Koha community. LibLime has invested significant resources into
Koha development and community infrastructure and will continue to do
so. LibLime will publish our LibLime Enterprise Koha enhancements. The
integration process with the main Koha code repository will be a
seamless one. We currently support dozens of libraries running on
official Koha versions on their own servers and it is critical to
their success that they benefit from the LibLime customer-sponsored
contributions.

Q: Is LibLime Enterprise Koha truly open source both in the letter and
spirit of the movement?

A: Our announcements are clear on this issue. From the press release
"Just to make one thing crystal clear: All of LibLime's development
efforts will be available to the library community under an
open-source license," ... "These are process changes, not
philosophical changes. As the leader in open-source solutions for
libraries, LibLime is 100% committed to the open-source movement."

Q: Why has LibLime chosen to deploy LibLime Enterprise Koha as a
Software as a Service offering only?

A: Our new cloud-computing platform makes the process of developing,
upgrading and maintaining Koha a seamless and fully-automated process.
We have not yet developed the mechanism for managing remote Koha
installations outside of our platform.  The requirements for keeping
these off-platform installations in sync with the rest of our install
base is not feasible. We are 100% committed to continuing to upgrade
our Appliance customers(non-hosted) and to keep them in step with the
latest community-released versions of Koha.

Thanks for your understanding.

Sincerely,

Josh

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
CEO                         migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS