Category: Koha

Koha turns 15

I’m not totally sure, but I think the 9th of September was when we first had a working DB connector going, the base of what would become Koha. Work started on September 6, but I think the 9th was when we first had some working code. So that would make it 15 years old today. Some useless facts:

  • Koha originally used PostgreSQL as it’s database
  • When it first went into production, every part of Koha was web based, apart from circulation, which used the CDK library.
  • 262 people have committed a patch (or patches) to the Koha code base
  • There have been 23567 commits (as of this morning)
  • The #koha irc channel has existed for 14 years
  • Koha did FRBR before that was a thing, and Koha was a platform before that was thing as well.
  • Koha has survived it’s own dirty politics scandal (non nzers can look that reference up). With Stephen Abrams (at the time Vice President of Innovation at SirsiDynix) writing a whitepaper about Open Source ILS spreading as much fear and confusion as possible. If you can’t beat them, lie about them … it’s the proprietary way.
  • I have 2181 commits to the code base of Koha

Feel free to chip in with any other facts you can think of.

Unsung heroes of Koha 29 – Jim Minges

I only ever met Jim in person once, at ALA in New Orleans a few years ago but his reputation well and truly preceded him. For those who don’t know Jim is retiring from his role as Director of NEKLS (Northeast Kansas Library System). But in his time as Director, NEKLS have embraced not only Koha but Open Source in general. Here is just a small part of that story, from facts I have gleaned by asking around. Please if anyone has any corrections, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Back in the day, NEKLS had a shared regional catalogue (I’m going with NZ english spelling before someone corrects that:)) called NExpress. They joined another consortium that was running a Sirsi system. Due to a variety of reasons including the desire to be in control of the system, to be able to mold it to their needs and to be in control of the implementation, they decided to move to another ILS. Due to those same reasons it really could only be an Open Source system, other systems simply can not be modified to anywhere near the same extent. Of course when choosing Koha, the monetary cost came into consideration, buying licenses for the 13 libraries that were part of the shared system at that time was a decent chunk of money.

Being the Director, the buck stopped with Jim, and he made the decision (trusting in the skills and knowledge of his staff) to go with Koha. As NExpress is all about resource sharing, the value of a project where sharing is the core became pretty evident. From what I can tell from reading and talking with people who worked with Jim, the values resonated with him personally as well. Under Jim’s leadership NEKLS began to cooperate and share on a world stage, developments paid for by NEKLS are being used by libraries in every corner of the world.

However this certainly wasn’t the only hard Koha related decision Jim had to make, when Liblime moved away from the community, and began to offer support only for their fork of Koha, NEKLS had to decide what it would do. So despite it being a very hard decision to make and that it would most certainly involve ramifications, Jim took the bold choice to move from Liblime before the contract had ended and back to Koha (supported by ByWater Solutions).

The takeaway from me is that Jim is the kind of leader any organisation deserves, but so few get. Someone who can make the tough choices, but who trusts the knowledge and expertise of his people to guide those choices.

So thanks Jim, Koha and it’s community would be a poorer place without you.

Unsung heroes of Koha 28 – Rachel Hamilton-Williams

A few years ago, and I’m sure that everyone would know of Rachel, however over time as new people join the community it’s important to refresh the collective memory.  Without Rachel Koha wouldn’t exist, it’s as simple as that. Not many people would be game to agree to have their company write a library system in 3.5 months, even less would be able to make it happen. Rachel did both those things. She managed the project, provided lots of testing, did all the design including UI and UX, as well as making sure all the other clients of Katipo continued to be looked after.

Even though Rachel isn’t very active in the community anymore, Katipo still provide the hosting of the main mailing list, and Rachel helps to look after maintenance of the list. After 15 years (we started in August 1999) I am sure neither Rachel or I thought Koha would be as popular as it is now, and without Rachel it most definitely would not have been.

Some Catalyst stats from Koha 3.16.0

For 3.16.0 there have been a total of 1262 changesets from 77 different developers.

Catalyst submitted 44 of those changes, and the Catalyst Academy another 13.  Also Catalyst signed off (tested) 172 patches, and the Academy students signed off another 21.

I want to make a special mention of Aleisha Amohia here, who has been coming in to Catalyst every couple of weeks for a few hours after school to test patches.  She has 1 patch and 8 signoffs in Koha 3.16.0

 

 

Who drives the bus?

In late April I attended a symposium on supporting cultural heritage with open source software. It was a great symposium, with lots of very interesting discussion. One thing was brought to my attention though, that I wanted to write about here, is that there was a perception that the development of features in Koha is driven by the developers. I’m not sure how this was arrived at but it couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact of the many thousand features in Koha, less than 50 (and 50 is probably too high) have come from anything other than directly from a library’s desire.
Developers may drive things like the switch to Template::Toolkit, or adding DBIX::Class, but almost every end user feature has come as a result of a library asking for it. There are no focus groups, no marketing departments deciding what features to add based on what they think people will buy. Features are added to meet the needs of users, when/if those needs are articulated.

I’ll finish with this quote from irc

oh except that time .. when katipo decided to write an ils just for fun, then forced HLT to use it

Koha dropping security support

The Koha developers and users have decided that security and privacy of libraries and their users data is no longer a concern. When asked about this decision, Chris Cormack, one of the original Koha developers said: “Naw, it’s not really an issue anymore”. When pressed about the decision to store users passwords in plain text after 15 years of encryption/hashing, he said “Hey, if no one else is going to bother safeguarding the data, why should we ?”

koha-april-fools

Summary of the Catalyst Academy Koha group – 2014

This year we had 8 students working on the Koha project as part of the Catalyst Open Source Academy. They all were very productive as the statistics below show.

The number of patches pushed  (and the percentage of the ones pushed that week)

Francesca Moore 2 1.4%
Roman Amor 2 1.4%
alex_h 2 1.4%
daniel 1 0.7%
Aleisha Amohia 1 0.7%
Emma Heath 1 0.7%
Tom Houlker 1 0.7%
merllissia 1 0.7%

 

Developers with the most changed lines
Tom Houlker 245 4.2%
 Roman Amor 36 0.6%
Aleisha Amohia 23 0.4%
Francesca Moore 10 0.2%
alex_h 6 0.1%
merllissia 3 0.1%
Emma Heath 3 0.1%
daniel 2 0.0%

 Patches contributed

Catalyst Open Source Academy : 11 (7.9%)

Lines changed

Catalyst Open Source Academy : 328 (5.7%)

Signoffs

Catalyst Open Source Academy   11 (3.4%)

2013 – WTF Happened?

With still 9 days to go I’ve decided to do a bit of a wrap up for the year.

It was a pretty massive year in a lot of ways starting with

Koha

  • This year we had the highest number of commits ever, as of today 2619 commits
  • 82 different people had code committed into Koha
  • 32 were new developers
  • At least (probably about 4 times this many really) 167 libraries liberated themselves by moving to Koha
  • 3.12 and 3.14 were released on time and with no major issues
  • Kohacon in Reno was a great time.
  • The NZ trademark issue was finally settled with the Community winning it’s challenge to Liblime/PTFS’s application.
  • I wrote 50 patches, signed off 182 patches, did QA on 72 and when doing release maintenance pushed 248.

Personal Stuff

  • Maui came to the 4th birthday party of Te Po Atarau.
  • Kahurangi turned 7 and had a space party.
  • I turned 40
  • Laurel had ankle reconstruction surgery, that resulted in a bunch of complications that meant I did the school run for most of the year.
  • I gave 11 presentations. (It would have been 12 but I bailed on one)
  • I survived 3 Whisky O’Clocks
  • I travelled 36,577 km

Finally that’s over – PTFS/Liblime Trademark on Koha not registered

As most of you are aware on Wednesday we found out that the Trademark application had been rejected. Which is a massive relief for all involved in the Koha project. To quote myself:

 

“While it hasn’t slowed down the progress of Koha, it has been a dark shadow hanging over us for nearly four years,” he said.

“I would like to thank everyone involved in helping us, the many people who donated money, Buddle Findlay for representing the trust, my employer Catalyst, and AJ Pietras and Co who provided legal support, as well as the many thousands of people who sent well-wishes.”

Here is a list of the publicity around this decision.

Please let me know if you spot any more