[Koha] Foundation conversation

[Jared Camins-Esakov]

Amy, et. al.,

> There was a recent post that asked for reasons to form a foundation.  Here
are a few that we think are important:

Thank you for clarifying. I have a few more questions, as I try to clarify
for myself, and hopefully for others, too, why we might need a Koha
foundation.

> 1. One organization that is granted the right to hold all Koha assets

Fair enough. However, why a foundation instead of the HLT, or any of the
other options discussed last year? I asked some of the folks in NZ, and they
confirmed that HLT is legally permitted to hold assets.

> 2. A single Website for Koha

Could you clarify the relationship between a new foundation and the Koha
website? There's the koha-community.org website which is the official
website for Koha, and the koha.org website which, as I understood it, is run
my PTFS/LibLime. Are there other websites, too, that are not controlled by
anyone in the Koha community?

> 3. An end to further or future controversy or actions regarding name
changes, copyrights, trademark issues domain names and any possible
enforcement of the use/misuse of any of these assets.

Definitely a good thing. Any chance you could clarify how a new foundation
would prevent controversy? Open source ultimately is dependent on voluntary
association, and everyone agreeing to follow the same set of rules. Having a
foundation doesn't mean that in 2012 someone couldn't come in and say "I
don't like your rules, and I'm trademarking the word 'Koha' in Japan."

> 4. A better way to manage and channel the development efforts all involved
(corporate and independent) for the benefit of one community version.

I am not sure that I understand what you're getting at here. Based on my
understanding, however, it seems to me that the solution here is
transparency. I would speculate that most developers are working on the
projects that *they* want to work on, either for their own use or for their
clients' use. To take a concrete example: I completely understand why an
"image library" feature is not a high priority for the Koha project. If
someone wants a digital library, he or she is probably better off installing
a digital library system like Greenstone or Kete (full disclosure: I've used
neither). On a general level, I agree with that entirely. Koha is an awesome
ILS, let projects produce awesome digital libraries. On a specific level,
however, this is a feature that I needed. So I developed it, and will
continue to develop features that I need, whether they are destined for
mainstream Koha or not, and make them all available in my public repository
for anyone else who can use them. That said, I certainly hope that all the
features I develop are incorporated into mainstream Koha, because rebasing
my code every few days is a nuisance. My development efforts will continue
much in this vein, regardless of the existence or non-existence of a
foundation.

> 5. New governance that will help manage the growth of Koha in a way such
that corporate and independent entities will unite and both contribute
time.  Corporate entities will assist in funding the foundation until it is
self supporting.

This seems very similar to point 4. Putting that aside, don't both corporate
and independent entities contribute time to the Koha project right now?

> 6. Full time paid staff that concentrate 100% of their time on the product
to coordinate and accelerate the pace of development preventing serious
delays in future releases as has been experienced since the release of
version 3.0.

This seems clear enough, although I am not quite sure why a new foundation
is required for this. If I had a lot of spare change lying around, couldn't
I hire a full-time developer to work on Koha?

Thanks for clarifying.

Regards,
Jared Camins-Esakov

P.S. Should anyone actually have a use for the image library feature I used
in my example, it's available in my public repo at
http://github.com/jcamins/koha/tree/image_library

--
Jared Camins-Esakov
Freelance bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC
(phone) +1 (917) 727-3445
(e-mail) jcamins at cpbibliography.com
(web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/
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