[Koha] Koha vs Liblime Koha

[Chris Cormack]

On 6 December 2014 6:19:53 am NZDT, Greg Barniskis <gbarniskis at scls.info> wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>As others pointed out, LLK and Koha are not the same. They were once
>upon a time, but speaking as someone whose employer (SCLS) chose LLK
>but who also watches the Koha community with great interest, I can
>confirm the products are divergent, and increasingly so.
>
>Some key differences that are of note (and I'm sure there are others):
>
>LLK is, technically, open source, but not nearly as open as Koha. Too
>many differences to get into in any great detail here, but in summary:
>very different. You can download it and use it, but you won't find many
>others who are hosting it and thus able to help in that area; your
>realistic choices for support are be a LibLime customer or Do It
>Yourself. Compare community, where one can download, bootstrap and get
>good help doing it.
>
>LLK scales very high. SCLS pushes on average over one million checkouts
>per month, pitting nearly 500,000 patrons against 900,000 bibs and 3.4
>million items. I believe that Koha can scale too, but so far as I know
>it really has not been battle-tested to the same degree. If/when it is,
>there may be some hurdles to clear (there definitely were for LLK when
>we started stomping on it).
>

It has, there are 1000+ public libraries in Argentina using Koha in a union Catalogue.  
PTFS Europe have a 47 library customer with 700,000 patrons. 

There are a few other examples, but I just wanted to squash the idea Koha is unproven at scale. 

I pretty much agree with the rest of the email. 

Chris 

>LLK uses Solr to meet our demanding search requirements. Koha started
>down that path but (if I understand correctly) is now heading toward
>other solutions.
>
>LLK fines and fees handling is now very different from Koha.
>Acquisitions too, I think, though I pay hardly any attention in that
>area...
>
>LLK is said to be slated to merge functionality with another fork, LL
>Academic Koha, creating a new super fork (a spork? =). This is probably
>going to be good for most LibLime customers, I think, but after that
>point I think comparing the resulting  product to Koha is really going
>to be quite a stretch of the imagination.
>
>Koha has a well-maintained manual, wiki, db schema map and other
>reference materials. While these were once also pretty valid sources of
>info for LLK, the fork divergence is continually eroding that value. It
>is not safe to read something in community resources and conclude that
>what you find there is also true for LLK. You can test, and you can
>validate in many cases that things are still similar if not identical
>under the hood, but you cannot just assume that they are comparable
>because in some cases they are not. For me, the fact that LLK lacks
>these documentation and info sharing resources is a real downside. On
>the upside, when we go to LL staff to get info, they do know or will
>find the answer, but IMO it would be better if the same scope and
>quality of reference material were there as exists for Koha. This is
>definitely a strike against the idea that you can just download LLK and
>Do It Yourself.
>
>
>----
>Greg Barniskis, Computer Systems Integrator
>South Central Library System (SCLS)
><gbarniskis at scls.info>, (608) 242-4716
>
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