Liblime are entitled to do this under the GNU GPL<\/a> license, as hosting does not constitute “distribution” which has certain rights and responsibilities under the license. \u00a0There is an Open Source license – an Affero General Public License<\/a> – that closes this loophole. Unfortunately for Koha the license wasn’t written until 2002 – two years after Koha was gifted to the community by the Horowhenua Library Trust .<\/p>\n Forking is not unprecedented in library Open Source Software. VuFind has several forks and this seems to be the community choice. See Going With and Forking VuFind <\/a>for more details .This is *not* the first fork of Koha – there is already Koha Plus<\/a> at Sourceforge, and Australian Company Proscentient Systems has been offering a hosted fork of Koha – Intersearch ILS<\/a> for over a year.<\/p>\n Liblime however, \u00a0own and administer the domain koha.org and have trademarked the name “Koha” in the United States, so they have played a key role in the Koha community up until now. Liblime deny that they are withdrawing from the Koha community, but this is not how the community is viewing it. Jo Ransom, who was instumental in creating Koha in New Zealand in 1999, claims that Liblime Forks Koha<\/a> . This t-shirt by another prominent Koha community member says a lot:<\/p>\n Marshall Breeding has suggested that a more librarian-focused and formal governance structure modelled on the Kuali Foundation<\/a> may be a better solution in his Open Letter to the Koha Communit<\/a>y. Thomas Brevik has suggested that there may be a role for an organisation like IFLA, \u00a0Where goes Koha<\/a>? Roy Tennant has compared the commercial forking of Koha to that of Redhat Linux, Liblime to the Koha Community: Fork You<\/a>. \u00a0Karen Schneider makes the point that this development highlights the role that Open Source software must play in the future of librarianship,\u00a0It Takes a Village: Koha and open source leadership<\/a> .<\/p>\n I do not know how much of the fork was driven by the client who contracted Liblime to create the changes. I think it would be extremely short-sighted to see any economic value in taking a base product created by millions of dollars worth of coding and design expertise, then paying tens of thousands of dollars for extra features but also cutting oneself off from working openly and collaboratively with other coders in future developments.<\/p>\n Liblime’s behaviour has been correct to the letter -but not the spirit -of their Open Source license;\u00a0 and ultimately likely to do them a lot of economic damage.<\/p>\n The big, bold silver lining to the cloud, however, has been the behaviour of other Open Source Library software support companies in the last week.<\/p>\n Two other major Koha support companies, BibLibre<\/a> from France and ByWater Solutions<\/a> have hired Nicole Engard to continue on as documentation manager (“until she drops” according to her announcement, Moving Up and Remaining Open<\/a> ). Nicole was working as Open Source Evangelist at Liblime until September 11, the same day as the forking announcement.<\/p>\n Instead of pointing out Liblime’s bad behaviour, Equinox<\/a>– \u00a0the main support company for the Evergreen Open Source Library Management System – \u00a0released a statement outlining their commitment to their community. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and through my geeky “I find Open Source Library Software fascinating” eyes, this is a beautiful statement about \u00a0the spirit of Open Source library software.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/images2.cafepress.com\/product\/407428972v2_480x480_Front_Color-White.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBeing the change you want to see<\/h2>\n