[Koha] LibLime Enterprise Koha Q&A

[Kyle Hall]

This is good news to hear. The question burning in my mind as a
developer is this: will your enterprise version be available via git
as you develop it, or will you just be releasing tarballs of source on
a periodic basis ( which is how I interpreted your press release ).

Thanks,
Kyle

http://www.kylehall.info
Information Technology
Crawford County Federated Library System ( http://www.ccfls.org )




On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Joshua Ferraro <jmf at liblime.com> wrote:
> 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 Q: Has LibLime withdrawn from the Koha community?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 A: LibLime has not withdrawn, and does not intend to withdraw, from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
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