[Koha] Koha/Evergreen Comparison Site

[Jason Etheridge]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 3:22 PM, Chris Cormack <chrisc at catalyst.net.nz> wrote:
> I'm actually pretty ambivalent about it.
> I don't see pitching Koha vs Evergreen is helpful.
> Either of them are always going to be better than any proprietary system. Simply because they are not proprietary.

I don't trust comparison lists.  Besides often being outright
incorrect and populated by folks who don't know all the systems
equally well, I feel like you risk comparing apples to oranges while
calling both bananas, with the fruit being airborne to boot.  And if
you get so fine grained that there isn't much ambiguity for what a
bullet point actually means, then you can still miss the forest for
the trees, while providing a misleading sampling of specific types of
trees.

I would rather see the software in action and compare on that basis,
for a given need.  You'll pick up a lot of information missing from a
bullet point--for example, how usable a given feature actually is.
And, hey, with Koha and Evergreen, at least, there is nothing stopping
you from checking these things out.

I generally think that all software has strengths and weaknesses, and
for non-trivial software there is no such thing as being “feature
complete”.  A given application has a set of features that is either
aligned with the needs of the people actually using the software or
not, and for free and open source software, these feature sets are
very malleable.

If folks feel compelled to create these things (and I think the urge
to maintain them is much weaker than the urge to create them), I think
they should provide the benefits for each feature, to help provide
more context.

Incidentally, EG 2.4 has a security-update only status; 2.5 and 2.6
are the latest stable series.

-- 
Jason Etheridge
| Support Manager
| Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
| phone: 1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
| email: jason at esilibrary.com
| web: http://www.esilibrary.com