Hi, Stephen ! Nice to read your post. I've been lurking on the list, but haven't been active as things have been a bit hectic here :) Just a small precision : Jean-Pierre has not been hired to manage our experience with Koha - he is our VP sales and has many other ongoing project. Our goal is not to "absorb Koha", but to become part of the community. Our interest is to provide the best service we can to our customers by integrating existing and new solutions ; we're a services company. Though INEO is part of a big (huge!) conglomerate, the relationship with our parent company is very loose. We think of ourselves as a 50-60 person company (which is large enough in my book !)... I'm glad thing are going well with the SAN - your input has been very valuable and probably a key point in their decision. We are writing a software developpement road map with Paul, and will keep you posted on what's happening here. I - personnaly - agree it may be a bit prematurate to talk about release management or QA. We need first to get acquainted with the job... Thank you again for your input, and don't forget : Paris is but a few hours drive+flight from Athens :) Say hello for me to Owen and Joshua. -- François-Laurent CONTENAY INEO media system -----Message d'origine----- De : Stephen Hedges [mailto:shedges@skemotah.com] Envoyé : jeudi 5 mai 2005 13:23 À : Paul POULAIN Cc : koha-devel@lists.sourceforge.net; François-Laurent Contenay Objet : Re: [Koha-devel] RM for 2.4 [news from france] Paul POULAIN said:

The result of this trip (apart from meeting in real life stephen, owen & joshua that was really great) was that SAN decided definetly to go with Koha.

Excellent! (I had a felling Yves would make the "right" decision.)

What i'll request is to write what they will add & publish it ASAP. In fact, i/we already have written some pages (in french) about that. Still has to be completed & translated. But should arrive soon.

Good. I think it would be very interesting to see what SAN-Ouest Provence would like to add to Koha. It's quite likely that their "wish list" will have a big impact on the future direction of Koha.

What will Ineo do in this matter ? Ineo, as a large company, will help SAN to go to Koha. So, they will coordinate dev of new features, help them migrating, teach...

Frankly, I am a little nervous about INEO being too deeply involved with Koha too quickly. It is a large company, with lots of resources (it's part of a much, much larger company), but that can be both good and bad. A large company can do a lot to promote Koha. But a large company, if it wants, could easily absorb Koha. Koha is still a small open-source group. INEO's involvement will instantly increase the number of _active_ developers by about 50% (or more). That could be either good or bad. INEO has recently hired a very experienced library automation person (Jean-Pierre) to manage their experiment with Koha. (François-Laurent, please correct me if that is incorrect.) But I think that INEO will want to assess this experiment at some point and decide if they want to continue their involvement with Koha. So once again, I think we might want to proceed with caution as we build a relationship with INEO.

So, the next question is : who, from Joshua or Ineo would be the best RM ?

I think both -- but Joshua first (2.4), then INEO (2.6 -- or even 3.0, if SAN-Ouest Provence proposes some really BIG changes) in about six months. That would give INEO time to become part of the Koha community and get very familiar with the code (and decide if they want to continue with Koha). And perhaps Chris' idea of having INEO do the QA would be a very good way to accomplish that. Stephen -- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com