Joshua Ferraro <j...@liblime.com> wrote: > Many of the Koha vendors listed on the support page do not contribute 100% > of the code they write for customers to the community, and we've learned > over the past fwew years that in some cases this is due to them not being > paid for that effort, and in other cases, its a deliberate attempt to > proprietize components of the services they offer.
TTLLP software.coop has, from our inception in 2002, contributed 100% of our Koha code to the community. It doesn't always get to koha.org because sometimes it gets rejected or sometimes there's a bit of a delay in preparing patches against head, particularly when we've forked in order to stabilise a release to our co-op customers and didn't budget for that in advance, but it's always public at some point. We believe in cooperative values and principles, especially concern for community. Approximately 35% of my time last year was spent on community work. Some of my colleagues do more, some do less. I've asked other support companies to join us in a cooperative, but none took it up and one objected (without reason IIRC). I've asked for the project to associate with one of the long-running global software foundations, even just as a stepping-stone to a worldwide Koha foundation, but it hasn't happened yet. I'd be interested to hear directly from any Koha users who want to join a co-op or foundation. However, we also believe in open membership and I think the current support page format is a barrier to entry, not an incentive. It's more of an incentive to fork the project website than to contribute because it will take years for anyone's entry to compete with the current big LibLime advert. There are some conflicts of interest, too. Firstly, as Release Managers for the last and next releases, LibLime employees control the amount of code from different providers which enter the codebase: non-LibLime patches are rejected more often than LibLime patches; and some patches have been reattributed to LibLime. Secondly, as sole webmasters for the website now, LibLime has an incentive not to update. Thirdly, it's bad marketing for the community: it makes the support directory too long and 55% is a monopoly-level share which makes the Koha community look weak. (Arguably, the Koha community is a bit weaker than ideal at the moment, but we shouldn't make it look weak to potential buyers!) [...] > I respectfully disagree. Listing by date joined is the most > vendor-independent and community-focused. Another fair option would be to > list in order of contributions, most to least. This community is, after all, > a meritocracy :). User-sortable listings are the best. If this is a meritocracy, let the ideas compete on their merits and user-sortable (which wasn't considered in the previous private discussion) will win. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef). LMS developer and supporter for a small, friendly worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237 _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha.org http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
