[Koha-devel] KOHA version 3.0, my question is about the advantages of KOHA 4

[Clay Fouts]

Each vendor has their own (sometimes very large) customizations that they
may or may not port back into community code. The community RM may or may
not accept these back ports even if effort is made to rebase them. Please
point to the line distinguishing "Koha" from "not Koha".

Is BibLibre's fork Koha? They have substantial, potentially irreconcilable
differences that appear not to be destined for the community base and their
extremely patient efforts to point this out and seek solution are met with
little more than a dismissive that "well, that's your problem." Who is or
isn't cooperating this case?

Is Software Coop's fork Koha? I understand there are large differences that
they are not paying to port back into the community base. I even recall
seeing an announcement that someone was paying ByWater to do the work of
porting the coop's EDI code back to community. Does this qualify as
"cooperation"? How is this different from LibLime publishing its code so
that any library is welcome to pay the vendor of their choosing to back port
it to community? Would we receive the same praiseful press release if
ByWater was getting paid to port our large-bib functionality into community
code?

The community had their opportunity to fork their project from the company
that owns the trademark, website, etc. and call their software something
different, much like LibreOffice and Jenkins chose to do when splitting from
the Oracle-run projects. But that wasn't the choice that was made, so now we
all get to have endless arguments and have libraries confused about what is
or is not Koha.

At the very least, LibLime when asked tries to be respectful of our
differences and does not say "well, that's not really Koha."

Regards,
Clay


On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Chris Nighswonger <
cnighswonger at foundations.edu> wrote:

> 2011/6/6 Clay Fouts <cfouts at liblime.com>:
> > We do not in general make an effort to coordinate our work with other
> code
> > bases, nor attempt to port our code over to them. The source is however
> > available for all to see. Upon release from the sponsoring customer, we
> > publish the source code for anyone to work whichever pieces they want
> into
> > whatever code base they manage.
>
> Cutting to the chase, your wordy explanation can be reduced to a one
> word policy: Non-cooperation.
>
> Wording it that way wastes less of our time on parsing the verbiage.
>
> Liblime's product is simply *NOT* Koha. Period. End of discussion. And
> I'm not sure we really want what they have at this point anyway.
>
> Now back to more productive work.
>
> Kind Regards,
> Chris
>
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