On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> On 6/20/06, John F. Blyberg <blybergj_at_aadl.org> wrote:
> > The established, deep-rooted
> > systems in place now are meant to preserve a perpetual profit mill.
>
> Wow, that's pretty cynical. Are all vendors so short-sighted? Talis
> seems to be singing the openness tune. I bet the first vendor to
> actually have a go at working with the community would win a lot of
> enthusiastic marketers.
>
As a refugee from the software-development world, I wouldn't call
that cynical at all. Sure, there are people in software
development shops who get excited about the product they're
creating, but fundamentally the systems of for-profit companies
are in place to make a profit. Shareholders get very wriggly when
quarterly reports come through with lower numbers, and it's risky
to change profit models.
Openness is a massive change of profit models, especially in a
sector which has made a lot of its profit based on the difficulty
of switching from one system to another.
Moreover, I would say that even the less cynical components of
the software development world don't have their eyes on the same
prize that librarians do. Librarians need reliability and ease of
use above all, followed by bells and whistles at the end (this is
a vast oversimplification, of course; I'm thinking of scalability
as a subset of reliability, and cross-platform functionality as a
subset of ease of use, for example). But vendors, at least, do
not believe that improved reliability, usability, and easier
customization efforts are really what will sell the next version
of their product.
While I don't want to be one to say that librarians won't have
good OPAC or ILS software unless we righted ourselves, it's true
that all of the best software I use are the tools which
programmers use themselves. When programmers write tools for
programmers, they have exactly the feature set and usability
design that programmers want (well, they do when it is open
source systems, anyway, and the programmers' needs aren't being
reinterpreted for a marketing department). Until librarians get
heavily involved in the design of the software products, and
until we insist on going the open route so we don't get tied into
massive ILS systems which require at a minimum a three-year
migration strategy, and which we therefore stick with simply out
of inertia, we're not going to get what we want.
I would love to see a library vendor take up the Red Hat model of
making a profit: getting behind the various open-source packages,
working on making them enterprise ready, and selling
documentation, support, and training. But I don't think it's
going to be one of the existing vendors who really commits to
that.
-Deborah
--
Deborah Kaplan
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Brandeis University
Received on Thu Jun 22 2006 - 09:36:25 EDT