Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> If you have any programmer/software engineer staff at all, you should be
> looking for other universities to collaborate with on _shared code base_
> open source solutions. And allocating resources to that. That could be
> Evergreen or Koha, or it could be something other than an ILS (say, the
> SOLR type solution you mentioned before).
>
> But what I think we need to progress is more shared codebase true open
> source projects. Koha and Evergreen count. But what I'm particularly
> meaning to exclude are the sorts of solutions: "Here's something I put
> together for our own specific situation; you are welcome to take the
> code and modify it however you want." In the open source world, that
> ends up being one kind of what's called a "fork"---in the end,
> everyone
> is using similar code, but not the same code, so improvements made by
> one are harder to share with others. It takes more up front effort to
> have code where everyone is really using exactly the _same_ code
> (configured differently; the more time up front is building in the
> proper configuration support), but gives you serious dividends down the
> line. It's that kind of effort that will give us seriously better software.
This sounds like a great idea, but would you clarify this a bit more for me? For example, for my own catalog, I have modified Koha, building on their work. Would this count in your scenario or not? If I had built my own catalog from scratch (ouch!), would this not have fit in? But mine is not a modular type of addition, at least not now.
A concern of mine in this scenario is something that I am considering now. My catalog is built on Koha 2.2.7, but the 2.2.9 version includes Zebra capabliity, similar to Lucene. I very much want to use the 2.2.9 Zebra, but I also don't want to lose my editions. So, I'll be looking at a lot of work. Are you suggesting that a modular system with plugins, similar to Firefox, would be possible? If it were, it would be the best of the worlds.
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Received on Wed Sep 12 2007 - 13:25:18 EDT