Category: Koha

Setting the record straight

I’ve been thinking for a while about the right way to clear up some rumours that were unceremoniously spread about me over the years. Rumours that I just let be for various personal and professional reasons. I think that now that the sale of Liblime to PTFS has been finalised it’s the right time to make just a few things clear.

My clarification is short and sweet – and long overdue. Contrary to what has been said over the last few years, I was not fired from Liblime – in fact I have never been fired from any job in my life. I resigned from LibLime simply because I felt that was what was best for the project and for my family.

koha-community.org

Today in a community meeting in irc it was decided to continue on with the koha-community.org domain and begin migrating things other than just the website to it.

From the email from Galen

The log of the meeting can be found at

http://stats.workbuffer.org/irclog/koha/2010-03-02#i_403276

I recommend that all members of the Koha community read through this
carefully.  Highlights of the meeting include:

* The draft rules for the Horowhenua Library Trust’s Koha Committee
have been assented to (with some revisions that were discussed during
the meeting) by HLT and the attendees of the meeting.

* As negotiations concerning the transfer of the US Koha trademark and
koha.org domain have completely stalled, we decided to adopt
http://koha-community.org/ as the main website of the Koha project and
to start transferring services such as the wiki, the bugs databases,
the Git repository to new hosting under the koha-community.org domain.

The next community handover meeting is scheduled for 19:00 UTC+0 on 6
April 2010.

New release of the Koha Live CD

From Miztik’s site

This release adds the much-requested Zebra support and updates Koha to 3.0.5. You don’t need to configure anything, as I have pre-configured zebra daemons to start automatically and added the crontab for indexing, which will be there as soon as the Live CD starts up. You do need to select to use Zebra when you go through the web-installer wizard, as well as selecting “Marc21″ when asked.

So go ahead check out the project page and give it a whirl

Kohacon10 registrations open

If you are planning on attending Kohacon10 in Wellington later this year, please go to http://kohacon.appspot.com/2010/registration/ to register.

Registration is free but we do need to know numbers. If you wish to donate to help with running costs there is a paypal button as well. Space is limited so please register only if you are coming.

Full git stats for Koha

So after the great article by Eric Hellman on his blog about the copyright to Koha code I decided to learn about subtree merging so I could combine the old koha repo, with the new one. That way instead of having the stats broken into 2 different ones, pre 2000 and post 2000, I can generate stats for the whole of the history of Koha.

Github has a great tutorial that I’m not going to repeat here. But if you follow it, you will end up with a repository that combines as many other repositories as you need.

So here’s the stats report. Some interesting things:

  • If you look at at the activity tab, you can see that we have pretty even coverage for all 24 hours of the day.
  • If you look at the general page you will see we average 3.2 commits a day .. doesn’t sound that much until you realise that is 3.2 commits average for 3755 days!!
  • Out of the last 32 weeks, there is a only a single week where commits dipped into single figures

So whatever might be happening elsewhere, main trunk development of Koha is as strong as ever. Tis good to see.

Koha round up from Linux Conf Australia 2010

I had a great week last week at LCA2010, apparently there were about 650 attendees … which makes it one of the larger conferences I have attended.

Some of the presentation highlights for me

  • Jeremy Allison’s talk about ‘The Elephant in the room, Free Software and Microsoft’
  • Andrew Tridgell – Patent Defence for Free Software
  • Patrick Brennan – The Bravest man in NZ
  • Mark Osborne – For his presentation in the education mini-conf and the lightning talk as part of the keynotes

And equally as good were all the social (organised and unorganised) parts around the edges. I got to catch up with some friends, and make quite a few new ones.

Ok, bringing it back to Koha, I mentioned Mark Osborne before, he is the deputy principal at Albany Senior High School, and one of the best advocates for Free Software and Koha you are likely to meet. His school is Free and Open Source Software end to end, linux on the servers, linux on the desktops, Koha, Moodle, Mahara, Inkscape .. the list goes on an on. One of the more memorable quotes of the conference and one that resonates hugely with me was in his lightning talk. In New Zealand Microsoft and the Ministry of Education have a deal locked up that provides Microsoft software free of cost to schools (not free of cost to taxpayers of course), so Albany could have done the easy thing and just taken this, but instead they chose to empower their students.

Although there was Gratis we chose Libre

Mark actually spoke before me on Tuesday at the education Mini-conf, he did such a good job I was actually rewriting my talk as he spoke to take out all the points he covered.

I also bumped into the fantastic people from Technology Wise in Tauranga. They have installed Koha in a couple of schools and working on getting it into more in the Bay of Plenty area. Smart people, passionate about what they do. I am sure we will be talking much more in the future.

As Jo mentioned in her great blog post, I also got to spend some time with Bob Birchall of Calyx. We had some good talks and formulated some good ideas for the future.

There was also quite a bit of interest in Koha from attendees, and I learnt quite a few little tips that can be useful for us. I really do think 2010 is going to be the best Koha year yet.

Release Manager for 3.4 elected

And in the final (maybe) piece of Koha news today. I have just been voted in as the Release Manager for the 3.4 release of Koha. The next general meeting will include the voting for the other positions, such as Translation Manager, QA Manager, Bug wrangler etc.

I will be staying on as Translation Manager until a new one is elected and we hand over, and for the remainder of the 3.2 release (alpha due any day now) Galen is the release manager still.

I’m honoured that the community has placed this much faith in me, and I know I have a huge act to follow after Galen. It has been almost 8 years since I was last Koha release manager … there have been 83 new people who have committed to the Koha code base in that time, and a much larger pool of active developers.  I will do my best to remain open in communication and to listen to all opinions. My proposal for 3.4 can be read here, it is of course not set in stone.

PTFS acquires Liblime

Some big news in the Koha world today, as well as the fantastic news that Biblibre and Bywater are partnering to offer services in the US comes the news that PTFS have acquired Liblime.

Over the last year PTFS has grown into a participating and valued member of the Koha community. Its developers are active on irc, the mailing lists, bugs.koha.org and the koha wiki. Patches are regularly sent from PTFS for bugfixes and new features. The fact that PTFS is an active member of the community leads me to treat the news of its acquisition of Liblime with great optimism.

I am hopeful that this will mean that previously unreleased code will be released and that the community can work together advancing Koha for the benefit of all. This quote from the press release

PTFS has supported ILS solutions for 15 years and is committed to resolving community differences and advancing Koha open source library technology

leads me to believe that PTFS understand that the way forward is to be part of the community, with all the benefits that brings.

Congratulations to PTFS and I look forward to it’s continued and increasing participation in the growth of Koha.

ByWater Solutions and BibLibre partner in US

Some great news today, that ByWater Solutions and BibLibre have partnered to offer services to Libraries in the US. BibLibre is a long time member of the Koha community with a long track record of full, open and honest participation. I have known Paul for over 9 years now, and the other owners of BibLibre for nearly that long also. Not only have they grown into respected and trusted members of the Koha community, I am proud to call them my friends too.

ByWater, while a relative newcomer, includes within its ranks Nicole Engard, Koha documentation manager and champion of openness and freedom. Added to that, ByWater has already proven to be an asset to the community with Brendan and Nate active in all spheres of Koha development.

I am confident this partnership can only bring good things for Koha, and offer my congratulations to BibLibre and ByWater solutions.