Koha community squares off against commercial fork [LWN.net]

Koha community squares off against commercial fork

Posted May 6, 2010 0:03 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: Koha community squares off against commercial fork

I'm not sure that HLT could have been known in advance to be a more trustworthy owner for the various rights than Katipo turned out to be.

It seems to me that the parties to contact would be PTFS's customers, who are presumably libraries (traditionally highly invested in the dissemination of information and in a cooperative relationship with their peers), presumably have the code licensed to them under the GPL, and may have additional contractual rights (based on their support contracts).

to post comments

Koha community squares off against commercial fork

Posted May 6, 2010 2:01 UTC (Thu) by ranginui (guest, #65927) [Link] (4 responses)

I think the mistake made was in trusting Liblime, not Katipo. But I do agree totally with the point about Libraries are the ones who need to create noise about this.

Koha community squares off against commercial fork

Posted May 6, 2010 2:17 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (3 responses)

Did anyone particularly trust LibLime? It sounds to me like they trusted Katipo, and then LibLime bought Katipo (or at least the relevant parts). LibLime behaved badly, but there wasn't anything the community could do at that point.

Koha community squares off against commercial fork

Posted May 6, 2010 2:31 UTC (Thu) by ranginui (guest, #65927) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm Chris Cormack, one of the workers who went from Katipo to Liblime. Had I known or had I even thought any of this would have happened I wouldn't have gone, and the asset transfer would not have taken place.

It is one of the things I will always regret. The fact is that 3 of us who worked on Koha at Katipo thought we could do more for Koha working at a company that focused soley on Koha. Katipo was doing all sorts of other work (Kete is another piece of Free Software that has come from the Katipo and HLT relationship, a relationship which continues to this day).
I honestly thought shifting to work at Liblime would be better for the project .. in the 2 years previous Liblime had done remarkable things for Koha. This is what made the situation more saddening, Liblime were once a respected and valued and perhaps naively (by myself anyway) trusted part of the community.

Koha community squares off against commercial fork

Posted May 6, 2010 3:36 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, okay; my experience has mostly been of such transfers being out of the hands of the developers involved. In any case, I don't think you could have known that Liblime wouldn't be a good maintainer, or that Katipo would have continued to be a good maintainer, or that HLT would have been a better place for the assets, and the rest of the community really couldn't have known that you'd make a choice which would turn out to be wrong. I think think ultimately have to come down to lots of unrelated people having the right to do something about misbehavior, rather than trying to find someone trustworthy.

Koha community squares off against commercial fork

Posted Oct 11, 2010 23:22 UTC (Mon) by slef (guest, #14720) [Link]

With hindsight, the warning signs were already there by the Katipo Koha sale. LibLime were calling themselves the "global leader" even though they were a only recent follower. (software.coop had been selling Koha services since Winter 2002/3 and there are still some older than us.)

But that's with hindsight.