Uncertainty in the Koha community

There seems to be some unfortunate discord in the Koha community.  As an outside observer I’m not familiar with all the detail, but it seems that Liblime, who support it in the US, have announced that they want to centralise on one development platform, to be called Liblime Enterprise Koha. Some parts of the Koha user community, already concerned about Liblime’s trademarking of the name ‘Koha’,  have expressed concern about this, seeing  it as a development fork. Liblime have said that all their code will remain open-source, but there seems to be some uncertainty about the nature of this.  Very sensibly, Marshall Breeding has proposed a review of the governance of the Koha project to focus more on the libraries than the developers.

As an outside observer it is interesting to watch this from outside. As Breeding points out, the scale of usage had outgrown the development community and needs review. A similar thing happened with Linux and Red Hat some years ago. Hopefully some solution will be found as similar problems are likely to occur with other other Open Source systems.

“Information wants to be free…….”

“…so I can sell it”

Capital letters

There’s a story on the BBC news website about someone losing their job for using capital letters in emails for emphasis. We’ve all seen it – someone who believes their own part of the universe is more important than any other part and so sends bombastic emails.  And somehow it is easier to be bombastic via email than on the phone or in person, probably because the other person has no chance of immediate reply….

However it brings to mind another aspect of human behaviour which has always puzzled me. Why do students always turn on the caps lock before typing in their searches on the catalogue? As far as I know, no LMS differentiates between upper and lower case (probably for this reason), and Google certainly doesn’t by default. Yet I see it everyday – if a catalogue PC is rebooted, within a few minutes somebody has come along and turned on the caps lock (or even worse, is laboriously typing with one finger on the shift key!). This isn’t happening in just my current library either – user behaviour was the same in the the previous 3 libraries I’ve worked. As I said, it doesn’t really matter to the system, but I just don’t understand why it happens?????