On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Owen Leonard <oleonard@myacpl.org> wrote:
my question is about the advantages of KOHA 4 and LibLime, which presents differences.
The advantage of using Koha (the latest version of which is 3.4.1) is that it's part of a real open source project backed by a community of developers from around the world. Koha will always be free software and its development will always be done out in the open.
Owen brings up the most important point here: Koha has a community around it, while LK only has LibLime. Anyone in the world can contribute to Koha, either with patches sent to the patches mailing list [1], with bug reports filed in the Bugzilla database [2], by sharing reports/jqueries/tips/tricks on either the discussion list [3], wiki [4] or newsletter [5], or by participation in IRC discussion [6]. LK has none of those community tools (at least not anywhere where I could find them!). A statistical work up of the two codebases has been done recently, which is interesting for what it's worth [7]. One can watch Koha's codebase grow daily [8]. LK, like it's predecessor Harley, seems to be a static release rather than a living, growing organism, though I've been told that LibLime does have versions 4.4 and 4.6 in use for their clients (though not released as open source at this time). As a Koha developer and officer, I'll readily admit my bias, but hopefully the links below, as well as other posts on this thread, can help folks make their own decisions. Cheers, -Ian 1. http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-patches 2. http://bugs.koha-community.org 3. http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha 4. http://wiki.koha-community.org 5. http://koha-community.org/category/koha-newsletter/ 6. http://stats.workbuffer.org/irclog/koha/ 7. http://blog.bigballofwax.co.nz/2011/05/24/i-love-pulling-statistics-out-of-g... 8. http://git.koha-community.org/gitweb/?p\x3dkoha.git;a\x3drss -- Ian Walls Lead Development Specialist ByWater Solutions ALA Booth 732 Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com ian.walls@bywatersolutions.com Twitter: @sekjal