[Koha] [Koha-translate] [Koha-devel] Announcing ... Newkoha.org Website based on Plone

[Joe Atzberger]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Lenora Oftedahl <OFTL at critfc.org> wrote:

> The new site is lovely.
> However, the site really needs to be vendor independent or small libraries
> are going to turn away under the impression that they need to use a vendor
> to install and use the software.
>
> As for contributions, I think Eric is correct that contributions by a
> paid company should be attributed to the people who actually paid for
> them.  Perhaps something that states the contribution was paid for by ...
> and programming/development by ...
>

I sent a reply earlier in the thread that went into moderation and I'm not
sure it ever got through.  So at the risk of repeating myself (and perhaps
appearing in reverse order), I'll reply to this point.

Citing feature sponsors, while useful and appropriate for a page about Koha
history, or in the "About" section of the software, has nothing to do with
the "for pay" support page.  Let's be sure to keep these ideas separate.
The desire to have this attribution is not a proposal to modify the "for
pay" page: we'd be talking about building or augmenting a different
page/resource (fine by me, btw).  I'll explain why.

The companies listed are those with demonstrable Koha expertise who are
available for hire.  Having sponsored a feature does not make the sponsor
any more capable of providing Koha support, or even remotely interested in
entering into financial relationships with users around the world to do so.
The correlation is more likely to be precisely the opposite: that people who
sponsored a feature specifically DO NOT want to provide Koha "for pay"
support or development to others, since they themselves were paying another
party for that service.

And that makes sense to me.  Sponsors typically have their own real
libraries to run, and even assuming they wanted to, most municipal and
academic institutions would be prevented from performing commercial
developer/host functions (at least, not without a lengthy legal review
process).  So that's why the "for pay" page is concerned with feature
*implementation*, not sponsorship: because it's readers are interested in
available expertise.

-- 
Joe Atzberger
LibLime - Open Source Library Solutions
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