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Koha community squares off against commercial forkKoha community squares off against commercial forkPosted May 5, 2010 18:55 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)Parent article: Koha community squares off against commercial fork Well, it's kind of sad, but we have found out by now that the fate of a community project is often to work for free to make rich people richer. I am getting to feel guilty over having evangelized them to do so.
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Koha community squares off against commercial fork Posted May 6, 2010 9:09 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
Almost sounds like you're giving up on free software, Bruce.
Personally, I have no problem with rich people becoming richer because of my free software involvement. I get out more of the community than I put in, so why should it bother me that other people get out even more for less work?
Giving with the expectation of receiving Posted May 11, 2010 4:59 UTC (Tue) by hackerb9 (guest, #21928) [Link] Hi Bruce, I've respected your work for a long time, but, in this case, I have to vocally disagree. Yes, rich people often get richer off of community projects, but then they also get richer on proprietary projects, so it's not actually a relevant factor. The only question is: is it worth it to work for free on a community project? For me the answer is still "yes, of course it is". The benefits of Free Software to me and to my community are very real. The article says the Māori word koha means "reciprocal gift giving". It would be quite ironic if a company tried to take control of the Koha software without giving back. Fortunately for the Koha community, the expectation of reciprocity was clearly spelled out by the copyright license they chose: the GNU GPL v2. This won't be another MIT License fiasco like Wine vs. Cedega. Already there are signs the Koha story will have a happy ending. PTFS has just today (May 10th) given back to the community by releasing LibLime's changes to Koha over the last 12 months. --B9
Giving with the expectation of receiving Posted May 11, 2010 8:56 UTC (Tue) by ranginui (guest, #65927) [Link]
Yep that code is a great start, just to clarify it's PTFS' changes that have been released. To quote "LibLime assembled Harley to provide many of the features developed by PTFS over the last 12 months".
We are of course all hoping that Liblime's changes (Liblime Enterprise Koha) will soon follow.
Koha community squares off against commercial fork Posted Oct 13, 2010 20:04 UTC (Wed) by Lefty (guest, #51528) [Link] Clearly, there have been major missteps on both sides here. LibLime clearly antagonized the community, but the community brought its own antagonism toward LibLime into the (non-)discussions with PTFS, it seems, and adopted an "all-or-nothing" position. In my experience, taking an all-or-nothing position significantly increases your odds of getting nothing. This seems to be a case in point. A few observations: LibLime's original explanation for the need for a private repository makes complete sense to me. Where things went off the track there is in their failing to keep their word about merging back improvements combined with their (apparent) effort to do an end run around the license by moving the service to a web-based back-end, and thus never "distributing" it. Yeah, that's bad. Equally bad, I'd say, is the unwillingness of the community to even hear PTFS out under NDA. Businesses have clients, and clients don't necessarily want all their information shared with the world at large, rightly or wrongly. Businesses have businesses to run. I suppose you don't conduct your business discussions on public email lists or in public IRC channels, and I wouldn't expect that PTFS would want to, at least initially, until some general groundrules had been determined, either. Do you? By not even being willing to talk, any possible progress was stopped, given that PTFS had issues they believed needed to be discussed under non-disclosure. PTFS made an investment in Koha and extended a friendly (apparently) hand to the community. They were rebuffed, it seems. Is this situation a consequence that no one could have foreseen? Are people surprised here?
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