[Koha] About the Koha name (and koha.org.ve)

[Joshua M. Ferraro]

Hi José,

First off, welcome to the Koha community, it's great to have you
on board :-). See comments below:

----- "José Miguel Parrella Romero" <joseparrella at gmail.com> wrote:
> A few weeks ago a librarian and I bought and set up the koha.org.ve 
> domain (which is now down for maintenance) where we would like to host
> several library-related open source developments. 
I'd hesitate to 'sign off' on using the Koha brand to host additional
library-related OSS projects. It could add to the confusion over what
Koha itself is. That said, I think we can acomplish some of your goals
in a slightly different way:

> * Koha, and a Koha test installation in spanish, with a particular 
> template. Source code fully downloadable.
We'd love to have someone join the development team to maintain the
Spanish templates. So long as the POT files are kept up, the translation
can be generated at install time. If you have ideas on how to improve
the Spanish of the installer itself, we'd love to hear them.

You may also want to see our 'Beta' Translation framework:

http://translate.koha.org

It's based on Kartouche, and we've got a few ideas for how to make it
even better, but in the meantime, we could add a Ve language and you
could use that to make your changes (if it's convenient).

> * Local templates (with effects as in jQuery) and spanish translations
> (we've used the ones already distributed with Koha, but they need to
> be further adapted for the Venezuelan reality, for example we don't call
> users "Socios", which means "Member" (as in a "Club Member") but
> instead we call them "Usuarios" (users) -- fully downloadable as FOSS.
This is good to know, so we'll want to have both Spanish and Spanish_ve
templates.

> * Maybe a Koha-based ILS which uses AJAX (we're working on it) or a 
> Koha-inspired ILS which is Catalyst-based (that's a future plan) They
> will be fully downloadable as soon as we have nice code to share.
As far as the Koha-based ILS with AJAX, why not join the koha.org 
development directly? An Ajaxy interface for Koha would be an excellent
contribution, and I'd hate to see it get lost in what is essentially
a fork of the project. We're very liberal with our CVS privileges,
and there's been a lot of talk lately about moving to a distributed
version control system like 'git' which would make the process of
sharing code between teams much easier.

> * Other library-related developments, such as Keystone/Greenstone.
> They will be considered "evaluation technologies".
In this case, I fear that you'd do both Koha and Keystone/Greenstone
a disservice ... neither of them are a part of Koha, even if they
do interoperate well with Koha ...

> * Hopefully, documentation, in forms of reports, formal documentation
> (maybe DocBook-based) and presentations. Everything downloadable as
> free software.
Again, this is a great idea, we'd love to have you get directly 
involved in the documentation at the project level; we've used DocBook
for our http://kohadocs.org site, and it does seem like the best 
format moving forward for the 'official' documentation. If you have
ideas on how to coordinate the writing and translation of documentation,
we'd love to hear them. 

> * Contact information for both my partner and I as well as any other 
> person in Venezuela which works with Koha and would like to be cited
> in the webpage as a "support option".
We'd be glad to list you on http://koha.org/support/pay.html ... just
send me your contact info and I'll add you.

> * It will be cited as a Koha Interest Group for Venezuela.
> 
> * It will host a mailing list for spanish-speaking Koha users. Bugs or
> suggestions will be shared with the english-speaking mailing lists, as
> well as the bug tracker.
Having a Spanish-speaking Koha users mailing list sounds like a great
idea. I'd be happy to set one up for you on Savannah, or, if you would
rather host it yourself, that's of course, your prerogative :-).

> The site will be a little like koha-fr.org, but it will also host some
> non-Koha related stuff (though this may very well be off-webpage, for
> example in mailing lists or subdomains or a SVN server) -- I would
> also like to clarify that our plan is to stay _fully_ cooperative with 
> current Koha developments and the current Koha namespace. I've already
> contacted with Tina Burger from LibLime in order to give some ideas
> and material for the webpage.
Thanks for this assurance, we're glad that you're interested in becoming
more active in the community.


> Finally, I would like to know if using koha.org.ve seems sane for
> this. 
> I'd be really worried if we either infringe a trademark (however, Koha
> 
> is not registered as a trademark in Venezuela, and most likely it
> won't -- the Patents and Trademarks Office has a very strong policy
> about FOSS-related trademarks, even when it breaks international 
> treaties...
> 
> yes, we're an outlaw country :D) but I'd be most worried if this
> raises any undesirable reaction in our community. Please let me know
> your opinions if you're interested in doing so.

It's worth mentioning that koha.org recently changed hands from
Katipo to LibLime. LibLime plans to re-implement the website under
Plone (http://plone.org), which is what we use for our main website,
http://liblime.com. This transition will enable us to have direct
translations on the main koha.org website, so sites like koha-fr.org
and koha.org.ve won't be necessary anymore. If you'd like to maintain
a mirror of the new koha.org when it goes live, let me know and I'd
be glad to get that coordinated.

Thanks again for your email, You make a great addition into our 
community and we're thrilled to have you. If you have a chance, 
please hop on IRC sometime, we currently hang out on 
irc.katipo.co.nz #koha (my nick is kados).

Cheers,

-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS