Amy, et. al.,<br><br>> There was a recent post that asked for reasons to form a foundation. Here are a few that we think are important:<br><br>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.<br>
<br>> 1. One organization that is granted the right to hold all Koha assets<br><br>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.<br>
<br>> 2. A single Website for Koha<br><br>Could you clarify the relationship between a new foundation and the Koha website? There's the <a href="http://koha-community.org" target="_blank">koha-community.org</a> website which is the official website for Koha, and the <a href="http://koha.org" target="_blank">koha.org</a> 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?<br>
<br>> 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.<div><br>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."<br>
<br>> 4. A better way to manage and channel the development efforts all involved (corporate and independent) for the benefit of one community version.</div><div><br>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.<br>
<br>> 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.<br>
<br></div><div>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?</div><div><br>> 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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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?</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thanks for clarifying.<br><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div>Jared Camins-Esakov</div><div><br></div><div>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 <a href="http://github.com/jcamins/koha/tree/image_library">http://github.com/jcamins/koha/tree/image_library</a></div>
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