[Koha] Introduction - Sean McIntyre

[Sean McIntyre]

Reed,

First off thanks for the note.  I do not know yet if I'll be attending 
Koha Con, as we have a LOT of work we inherited and not a lot of time to 
do it.   If it does work out, I will certainly let you and others know 
well in advance.  New Zealand would be a great place to visit...

Thank you for the very nice words regarding our Harley release, that 
work was all done before I came on board, but the team will be pleased 
to hear the compliments.

Before I dive into the rest of your note, just a couple points regarding 
my outlook on the world.  First, any given situation can ALWAYS be 
improved and I find myself continually looking for such improvements in 
all that I do.  Constructive feedback such as you have provided is a 
"gift", and should always be received with an open mind.  Second, a 
person's point of view or opinion is just that; it is not a factual 
statement that can be proven to be right or wrong.  It is their view and 
should be respected and perhaps used to further a common understanding.

Not all of the above philosophies are pertinent to what you raised in 
your note, but I have very few such tenants that influence my outlook on 
the world, so I thought I'd share them all now at the outset.  :)

Now, to the points you raise.  I am in agreement that the communication 
could have been done differently and in such a way as to more clearly 
get across our intent.  As I said above, there is always room for 
improvement and there is ample opportunity in this case.   Prior to the 
acquisition we were a modest sized company with a very small portion of 
it working in the Koha / ILS space; this division is the only portion of 
the company that has had any experience with this open source community 
or any other open source community.  Post acquisition, the division has 
increased in size and importance to the overall company and many others 
in the company have been called upon to contribute to our efforts.  The 
announcement of 'Harley' exposes the fact that we have a good deal yet 
to learn regarding dealing with open source software communities and I 
expect we will benefit from this experience going forward.

To be clear, our intent in offering the 'Harley' release to the 
community was for it to be received as a positive step.  Our 
pre-acquisition clients had always advocated that their sponsored work 
be shared back with the community and this had been our intent since 
well before the acquisition.  If anything, all of the activity related 
to the acquisition slowed us down a bit in taking this step; but it was 
never in doubt that this was going to be done.  Unfortunately, the 
timing of this was quite poor on two fronts.  First, it coincided with 
the acquisition and all the activities surrounding it; this did not help 
in making our intentions clear.  Second, with version 3.2 in alpha and 
feature frozen, we knew it would be difficult to incorporate 'Harley' 
into 3.2 at this late date.  However, we felt it was still valuable as a 
collection of features and wanted to allow libraries to benefit from it 
without having to wait for version 3.4; which would hopefully 
incorporate many of the beneficial features we had offered.  As I said, 
the timing was just unfortunate on this front.  Three months earlier 
(s/w was not ready) or three months later (did not want to artificially 
delay it) would have been far less complicated for all involved.

Your suggestions on language that might have been received better than 
what we chose seem quite good to me.  It was a bit of a struggle for us 
as what we were describing had inherent complexities as noted above.  We 
felt good about labeling the release 'Harley', as that had no intrinsic 
meaning.  As you say however, the language we used has caused some 
confusion.  In fact, our own customers are a bit confused as to which 
"flavor" (deliberately trying to use a term that is not overloaded) of 
Koha has the most features.  For us, there are three choices we can 
offer.  The community supported 3.2 alpha Koha, 'Harley' or the LibLime 
Enterprise Koha; each of which have some unique features that could make 
them attractive options.  Overtime, we would like these to come together 
in some fashion for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which 
is to eliminate potential confusion.

As we go forward, how would you and others like the Koha 3.2 alpha 
software referred to?  Does the phrase you have used here, "community 
supported Koha" work for the majority?  How do other vendors deal with 
this terminology challenge?  Our preference would be to use terms that 
everyone is comfortable with across the board, the greater value here is 
in the software not the labels affixed to that software.

Sean McIntyre
Engineering Mgr, ILS
LibLime, a Division of PTFS

P.S.  I am afk most of the weekend camping, so I'll be catching up on 
the thread Monday.

On 5/14/2010 5:45 PM, Reed Wade wrote:
> 2010/5/15 Sean T. McIntyre<smcintyre at ptfs.com>:
>    
>> Hello Koha Community!
>>      
> Welcome!
>
> We look forward to seeing more of you. Will you be attending --
> http://www.kohacon10.org.nz/
> ?
>
>
>    
>> Soon I'll be joining the IRC chat on a regular basis and welcome any and all
>> comments or thoughts.  If you perceive my team or I are doing something that
>> is not as beneficial to the community as it could be, please let me know.
>> I'd be happy to talk about it and am optimistic that many of these
>> perceptions are based on mis-understandings that are easily cleared up.
>>      
>
> Since you asked, I guess I'll go ahead and start in.
>
> Let me start by saying, as many others have, the Harley code
> availability is really fabulous to see (really truly great stuff).
>
> But, the communication around it on the front page of koha.org is
> misleading to my eyes on two points:
>
>   - it presents Harley as an official Koha release, which is clearly not correct
>   - it re-brands the normal Koha releases as "Community Koha" which is
> not correct
>
> The first point seems likely to create confusion in those seeking
> support from the community since people will be coming to us thinking
> it is an official release.
>
> The second point seems just a bit bold. Prefixing the term "Community"
> in front of a product and giving it lower billing is normally done
> when a commercial company is providing a hobbled open source version
> of a useful product. It's certainly the impression I would get from
> looking at koha.org if I didn't know better.
>
> thanks,
> -reed
>