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

[Clay Fouts]

Hello, Paul.

What you describe here is an insightful analysis followed up with a
perfectly valid decision that embodies that priorities you've set for your
business in order to benefit your customers. There is a value in seeking to
keep in sync with the git.koha-community.org repo, and there is value in
diverging from it. It's a matter of personal and business priorities which
path to take, and I respect everyone to make that decision for themselves.

Cheers,
Clay


On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 6:38 AM, Paul Poulain <paul.poulain at biblibre.com>wrote:

> Le 06/06/2011 18:05, Clay Fouts a écrit :
> > 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".
> Well, I think we are mixing 2 things :
> * local & specific customizations
> * fork
>
> a local and specific customization: it occur very often. For example,
> one of our customer has very long barcodes, and the barcode length in
> the database is not enough for them. it's specific to the customer, and
> has nothing to do with a public version. Sometimes, it's not that small
> (even if it's local). For example, for Aix-Marseille universities, we
> changed the circulation (check-out) workflow to query a NFC reader&
> database. The NFC card & database is responsible to say if a card is
> valid and fill the members table in Koha database. This is OpenSource
> (GPL), available on our public git repo, but won't be submitted to the
> community, it's useless unless you've this exact technology. I agree it
> can be worth for a library using the same NFC technology and we could
> have announced what we made more widely. Our fault, nobody's perfect
> (announcement : if you've a 'horoquartz' NFC technology, you can drop me
> a mail ;-) )
>
> a fork. Do we have a fork ? Frankly, yes, but 1- we didn't wanted this
> to happen, 2- we do all what we can to fix this (yes we consider it's a
> "bug"). Reminder about the history : Koha 3.2 has been delayed due to
> events we all know here (for newbies, see :
> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/2011-February/027657.html),
> thus many feature we have developed have needed too much time to reach
> master (and had to be splitted/merged/...)
>
> I'm on my way to write a mail on our blog to detail how it happens, why
> we consider it a bug (and want to fix it), and what's the strategy to
> avoid it to happen again.
> In a few word:
> * we deploy only community version
> * if you sponsor a feature 2 options : you sponsor and use it live when
> it's in master, you sponsor, go live immediately. BUT if it's not
> included in master, then you'll have either to choose to switch back to
> community version (and forget you stuff), wait until it's in master,
> sign a specific contract for support from BibLibre (or someone else) to
> have your nice-feature-not-in-master rebased regularly vs master.
> * there are only a few things in "3.2 biblibre" that are not in 3.4, and
> everything will be in 3.6.
>
> > 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?
> Well, you're not completely wrong. I'm sometimes quite upset by
> "community". And I'm sure "community" is sometimes upset by me too ;-) .
> But I still think it's better to have strong discussions and arguments
> than doing our way without "the community".
>
> Hope that explains
>
> --
> Paul POULAIN
> http://www.biblibre.com
> Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
> Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
>
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