I think it will all depend on how you read the numbers.

If a project has (say) a third of the developers another project has, but has the amount of institutions using it, Koha has, it is a point won by the project. If the feature set is equal or better, then those numbers become more and more in favor of the project.

That said, I'm not sure how the FTE measuring model serves to what purpose. I guess it will depend on marketing guys using the numbers one way or the other.

In any case, I'm intrigued by this measures, because I'm confident Koha would show really interesting numbers ;-)

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Paul Poulain <paul.poulain@biblibre.com> wrote:

Le 12/02/2015 22:14, Marshall Breeding a écrit :

Brendan,

 

Some personnel FTE numbers from last year can be seen on the tables from the Library Systems Report:

http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/sites/americanlibrariesmagazine.org/files/content/Charts_MarshallBreeding.pdf

 

The numbers are for the company overall, and not limited to efforts expended on specific products or projects.

 

I 100000% agree with what other have said ! We differ so much from proprietary vendors that comparing is a hazardous thing. Do you have the answer to the following question: "is 2km bigger or smaller than 3kg ?"

Additional thought: I feel that, once again, I have missed the "marketing speech" in my answer (3FTE). I should have said 10 !
Marshall, what you must understand is that we've no marketing guy in our project (at least on koha-devel mailing lists). Most of us (all of us ?) don't care of being bigger/more beautiful/higher/... than others. We focus on product and development. What we love is hacking, not selling/promoting.
The consequence is that you'll compare numbers given by marketing guys vs numbers given by tecchie guys (I'm not implying that marketing guys lie. But we don't have the same way of understanding/explaining things. Once again 2km vs 3kg... )

Just one example: at the beginning of BibLibre, we were counting "Aix Marseille university" as one library ("it's obvious, that's one contract"). Then we realized that other were counting differently. So now we count Aix Marseille as 57 libraries ("it's obvious, it's a university with 57 different libraries").
But as we're still honest, scientists, and we prefer valid & verifiable numbers. So we usually say "BibLibre support more than 500 libraries through 100+ contracts" ;-)

Another example : compare my presentation made at KohaCon and the one made by Alvet (from Ebsco) : one was basic, the other was fancy. We will probably never reach such a quality in terms of fanciness. That's probably a weakness, but I'm sure that's also a strength: we want nothing less than changing the way ppl do business ;-) 2kg and 3km ...

OK, stopping to behave as the "old wise man", back to working ;-)

-- 
Paul Poulain, Associé-gérant / co-owner
BibLibre, expert du logiciel libre pour les bibliothèques
BibLibre, Open Source software for libraries expert

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