[Koha] Registering as a support provider at koha-community.org

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 10 May 2010, Lenora Oftedahl wrote:

> I have to agree with MJ here. This question is pretty simple.  Is a 
> company trying to take over a Koha asset for 'personal' gain?  If they 
> are, then that company is not really part of the community.  Have they 
> created a fork in the code?  Then they are not part of the community.

the problem is how you define these things.

Looking at Linux vendors as a parallel,

You will find people who believe that Red Hat has done all of the things 
above.

You will find others who believe that Red Hat can do nothing wrong and is 
the example that all other companies should aspire to, but that Connonical 
(the publishers of Ubuntu) are examples of pure evil.

I would expect that any companies doing significant work on Koha would 
maintain their own fork, if for no other reason than they need a place to 
test their changes before they are ready to be submitted upstream.

for that matter, if/when I make my own installation of Koha for my home 
library, I expect that I will end up maintaining my own fork for some 
things for at least a little while. The mere existance of a fork is not 
evidence of misbehavior, it's when that fork is misused that there is a 
problem, and that gets back into either judgement calls, or many, many 
detailed rules of what's acceptable.

As far as taking over a Koha asset for 'personal' gain, exactly how do you 
tell the difference between them doing it for 'personal' gain vs honestly 
believeing that it's best for the community?

This can be a very slippery slope, and even worse, if you have such a 
mechanism in place, people may end up feeling as if it has been misused, 
even when it hasn't been (people can mistake delays in validation because 
someone is busy with deliberate foot-dragging because it's a competitor 
for example)

It may annoy you to list companies that you feel are doing the community a 
disservice, but you need to think very carefully about the cost of going 
to other way.

Given that you have a wiki, you may want to list all companies in one 
page, but then have links to sub-pages for each company where users can 
add additional comments that are very clearly not the judgement of the 
community, but rateings of users. If you do this I would suggest that as a 
matter of policy, community officers refrain from posting any comments 
(other than a Legal officer noting the existance and providing links to 
the outcome of any litigation)

It's not just avoiding impropriety, it's avoiding any possible appearance 
of impropriety.

David Lang

> Lenora
> StreamNet Regional Librarian
> Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission
> http://www.fishlib.org
>
>
>>
>> The difficulty comes with the possibility of a company offering Koha
>> services that are not in the spirit of the community. [...]
>
> This is much simpler than looking for services "in the spirit".  It is
> a verifiable fact whether a company owns a domain or trademark, it is
> a verifiable fact whether that has been offered to HLT or another
> community group to manage and it is a verifiable fact whether legal
> proceedings over Koha have been entered and not resolved.  No judge
> required and the informal appeals process suggested for other
> delistings would be fine.
>
>
>
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