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.

PTFS and Evergreen

Interesting announcement from PTFS overnight that they are now partners for Evergreen software in Europe. PTFS were already offering to set up and maintain Evergreen in Europe, as they could for any OS software, but this formalises it and gives it the ‘official seal of approval’ -a sort of Approved Reseller status in a way, which should boost confidence in potential customers. I’ve not heard anything for a while about the spat with Koha either, so hopefully that has been smoothed out.

Open Source Conference

I don’t normally plug events unless I have some personal involvement in organising them, but this one deserves mention.  PTFS and Ken Chad Consulting are hosting the Breaking the Barriers conference at RIBA on 18th May. As far as I’m aware its the first national UK conference on the applications of Open Source in libraries, and will be looking at Evergreen and Koha, as well as a keynote address from Charles Leadbeater of ‘We think‘. To my mind this is quite significant in that it shows that things are changing even in the rather cautious UK library environment. I’ll be there and am looking forward to it!