Thomas Krichel of Palmer School of Library and Information Science has developed, and is sharing, course material for an intensive course he developed in which students, without any previous system admininstration experience, installed debian, and then installed Koha.

http://openlib.org/home/krichel/courses/lis508p10w/

All 17 of his students were successful…wanna give it a go?

“BibLibre wants to push libraries who call us to do development work, for Koha or any other piece of software, to write in the RFP itself or the contract that all the code produced will both: have an open source license; and be accessible on a public repository.”

via Liblime, Koha, BibLibre and FLOSS | BibLibre

If you are trying to make sense of what is going on with Liblime and Koha.  This is the article for you (by Kathryn Greenhill at her blog Libraries Matter Librarians Matter):

The Koha fork and being the change you want to see

The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community

We at Equinox Software feel it is timely to share an evolving document we call the Equinox Promise.

We invite engagement and feedback from everyone, and encourage other vendors to come up with similar statements, or join in on ours.

The Equinox Promise

In 2007, Equinox Software was founded by a group of dedicated people who believe that open source software offers libraries unheralded opportunities to engage in the process of designing the tools they use.

A software company can never speak for the open source communities it serves. But we at Equinox believe we owe our communities a clear statement of our commitments to everyone associated with the Evergreen open source project—whether you are customers of Equinox, Evergreen community members, affiliated vendors, or those who support and champion open source development.

We believe in a transparent, open software development process, and we promise to do everything we can to maintain and improve transparency in every part of that process.

We believe Evergreen code belongs to the Evergreen community, and we promise to continue to expeditiously release all code to publicly-available repositories.

We believe in one single set of code that in the spirit and letter of open source software is free for everyone to download, use, and modify, and we promise that in concert with the community and other development partners, we will work hard to maintain that single code set.

We believe we have a responsibility to the Evergreen community to help keep Evergreen open in every way, and we promise we will never agree to hide code we can share.

We believe that Evergreen deserves community-based stewardship through foundations, user groups, interest groups, conferences, and similar activities, and we promise to encourage that stewardship in every way we can.

We believe that the community is the true voice of Evergreen, and we promise to listen and to share, and to help build and maintain the tools that enable this communication.

via The Equinox Promise: An Open Letter to the Evergreen Community « Equinox Blog.

This announcement from Liblime officially established a forked version of Koha (or possibly two versions: see their new “budget-friendly ILS for Small Libraries”).  This is a sad day for the larger Koha development community. Rather than working together to improve Koha, Liblime will be developing their own version.  Granted, the Liblime version will also be released under an Open Source license but it won’t necessarily work nicely with the ‘other Koha.’   That means less developers available to each product.  And we already have too few developers.  Sigh.

Not sure if you’ve been following the developments with Koha but there is a strong movement afoot to develop a Koha Foundation.  This impetus in no small part due to issues with Liblime who has been a strong supporter and development partner for Koha but has come under fire recently about how they are doing business. You may have noticed that some of their employees have left Liblime for other OS projects (e.g. Galen Charlton went to Equinox, Nicole Engard was hired jointly ByWaters Solutions and BibLibre…and there have been other departures).

Here’s an announcement about the meeting:

Meeting about forming a Koha Foundation, 15 September 2009 | Software Cooperative News.

If you are interested in the discussion about why and how to form a foundation, this wiki page is useful:

http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=kohafoundation

plsinfo.org

2009-current. Helped establish and currently managing the Open Source Open Libraries Consortium in cooperation with Peninsula Library System and Califa. The goal of the consortia is to “empower libraries and library consortia by encouraging participation and collaboration in software products generally, and encouraging them to consider an Open Source Library System such as Koha or Evergreen.”

This message came through on the Koha mailing list. It’s from the 3.0 Release Manager Galen Charlton. It is worth sharing with everyone who wishes Koha continued success and appreciates the hard work of the initiators of the project as well as all the contributors that continue to add value to it. That includes me! Happy Koha Day on September 6!

This note from Galen:

Hi,

I just realized that I had created a happy coincidence by picking 6
September as the soft feature freeze date for 3.2. From
docs/history.txt:

September 6 1999 Work starts on Koha

By the power invested in me by absolutely nobody, I hereby declare 6
September 2009 (by New Zealand reckoning) to be global Koha Day in
celebration of the 10th anniversary of the inception of this project.

My thanks to the Horowhenua Library Trust for initiating our common
endeavor, and to all users and contributors past, present, and future
for making Koha the exemplar of sharing that it is.

Regards,

Galen
–
Galen Charlton
Koha 3.2 Release Manager
gmcharlt@gmail.com

(slides)
Presentation at KohaCon 2009. The goal of this session is to make sure people moving to an Open Source Library System such as Koha don’t treat the change as “just another migration with a new vendor” The possibilities are endless. It requires a complete culture shift to truly take advantage of the possibilities. And, its exciting! April 16, 2009, Plano, Texas.