[Koha] LibLime Enterprise Koha Q&A

Thu Sep 17 10:25:51 NZST 2009

Hi Josh, et al.,

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Daniel Grobani
<dgrobani at samuelmerritt.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I just got off the phone with Joshua Ferraro. My library is a LibLime
> customer, and we had some business to discuss.
>
> I took advantage of the opportunity to express the concern that I share with
> many others about LibLime making their code available to the community. He
> said, "We will not be making our git repo public as it contains
> customer-sensitive data."

We are not asking that LL's customer's Koha dbs be made public... only
that the code for the features that LL publicly obligated itself to
provide such as those listed

here: http://www.nabble.com/Additional-3.2-RFCs-td19448041.html#a19448041

and here: http://www.nabble.com/RFCs-for-3.2-tt17735030.html#a17735030

and here: http://www.nabble.com/RFC-3.2---hold-request-targeting-tt18989662.html#a18989662

and here: http://www.nabble.com/RFC-3.2---hourly-circulation-policies-tt17735161.html#a17735161

and here: http://www.nabble.com/RFC-3.2---email-checkout-slips-tt17735195.html#a17735195

and here: http://www.nabble.com/RFC-3.2---enhancements-to-notifications-and-messaging-tt17735362.html#a17735362

and...

and...

And BTW... what happened to the Joshua Ferraro seen in this quote:

"It'd be cool if we could push reports upstream to the community as part of the
http://contribs.koha.org site, with a new feature to allow you to find and add
reports to your Koha system that others had created and pushed up ...

Josh "

taken from here:
http://www.nabble.com/RFC-3.2-%3A-guided-reports-improved-tt18832709.html#a18882846

The operative phrase in that quote is: ..."push ...upstream to the
community..." That is the Josh I'm familiar with.

Josh: I'd say that if you (as representing LibLime) cannot make good
on the above commitments (which we must remember were to be included
in the 3.2 release), then you (and LibLime) have failed to honor your
word. If this is true (and I truly hope you will prove it not to be)
then this is a question of character. I would submit that whatever
short-term gains LibLime stands to obtain by sacrificing its word will
pale in comparison to the long-term losses LibLime will suffer in the
loss of character in both the FOSS community and the business
community. I would encourage you (LibLime) to invest the time it will
take, even if it is "off the clock," to produce a non-proprietary copy
of your git repo and make it public. This will speak *volumes* to both
communities.

Regards,
Chris

Christopher Nighswonger
Faculty Member
Network & Systems Director
Foundations Bible College & Seminary
www.foundations.edu
www.fbcradio.org

>
> Joshua Ferraro-3 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Koha mailing list
>> Koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
>> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
>>
>>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/LibLime-Enterprise-Koha-Q-A-tp25461986p25480875.html
> Sent from the Koha - Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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