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LibLime Koha is Chosen by the Guggenheim Museum

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• Open Source, For Profit, Nightmare Upgrades?

  (Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Wednesday March 28, @11:22AM (#29345) While most of us think of Open Source software as better, more flexible, collaboratively created and in some cases FREE...and in all cases SUPERIOR to traditional big vendor software...
  
  LibLime is in this game to make profits. Not that they shouldn't...but rumor has it their prices are comparable to the big guys...which means you save little if you go with them.
  
  And guess what...you can download Koha for free...
  but it has to be extensively customized to work for you specific situation...
  
  You know what that means...Oracle ring a bell...?
  
  That means what could be years of custom programming, things you need it does not do and which the pinhead of a programmer can't conceive of and won't do except perhaps if you buy him that Porsche he's been wantin..
  
  and when said virtuouso programmer quits guess what you have...a program that can't be upgraded but does de-grade because no one else understands it or so many different people worked on it it's a genuine Rube Goldberg mess or if someone can figure it out well, they would have "Done it all differently."
  
  Open Source is great if you are writing your own
  code and maintaining it yourself ...but if you have to depend on others it's
  programmer ego and unending money pit fixes....yuck!
  

• Re:Open Source, For Profit, Nightmare Upgrades?

  (Score:3, Interesting) by shoe (2556) on Wednesday March 28, @12:15PM (#29346)
  ( http://www.linuxlibrarian.org/ | Last Journal: Monday July 16, @07:56PM )

  Liblime is pricey, I agree. Not as much, maybe, as SirsiDynix or III, but I was looking at it for a small collection I catalog and it is cost prohibitive... Especially when you figure Koha is free (both in speech and beer) and web hosting is cheap. Essentially you're paying, then, a boatload of dough for support you may or may not need.

  
  

  I really do like Koha as an interface. I think it works well, and does really the core that most libraries need. And you can make it do what you want it to more easily than ringing up SirsiDynix and saying, "I need a widget that will do x." (Believe me, for the most part, they laugh at you, or say okay, and then never deliver). However, what Liblime is charging for Koha/hosting/support, you're better off hiring another part time (or full time) systems person who knows perl. (I don't, btw. But that doesn't stop me from h4x0ring the crap out of things). That way, you get someone who can support your ILS as well as work the reference desk.

  
  

  Liblime is a great idea... I mean, boxed support for open source platforms is wonderful. But I think they'd get a lot more people signing on if it weren't so steep.

  [ Parent ]

• Re:Open Source, For Profit, Nightmare Upgrades?

  (Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Wednesday March 28, @01:06PM (#29348) "But I think they'd get a lot more people signing on if it weren't so steep"
  
  How does one decide on pricing in this situation? Perhaps liblime looked at III/Sirsi and priced down from there, rather than looking at what many libraries could afford and gone up. Or maybe they based prices more on what they thought they cold run a business and be successful. [ Parent ]

• Re:Open Source, For Profit, Nightmare Upgrades?

  (Score:2) by shoe (2556) on Wednesday March 28, @02:22PM (#29350)
  ( http://www.linuxlibrarian.org/ | Last Journal: Monday July 16, @07:56PM )

  Perhaps. It's not that I don't want them to make money and succeed... Hell, if everyone were using OSS, I'd be psyched.

  I guess my contention is this... I was quoted roughly $4,000, IIRC, for a smaller database (10,000 or so records) and webhosting and support. A year. That's honestly at least $2,000 more than I was expecting.

  It would be idiotic to expect these guys to work for free. I don't. I know they've got mortgages, and student loans, and stuff like that. But I think, when they're just starting out with software people are a bit suspicious of by nature (face it... most people I run into are downright paranoid about the term "open source") they would catch more business by pricing less than the big boys.

  And if they can't price their product so that libraries can afford them, then what's the point? If my organization can't afford it... then they just can't do it.. The fact is most librarians I have run into would rather sink more money into a name they recognize, then sink $4k a year into something that's an unknown quantity.

  When I asked initially for Discoverstations (open source based PACs) to be implemented in my former place of employment, it was met with resistance. "It's Linux." "People won't understand it." "What happens when it breaks?" That's also a product with a fairly hefty price tag on the outset. Grant money was the only way I could get it in there. The thing is: Those were PACs, not a detailed list of the library's holdings, and the support was hardware support as well: something tangible.

  Liblime is dealing with intangibles: software support, and a virtual list of the library's holdings. Librarians are funnier over their catalog than they are over their public access computers... rightly so. I just think they could have hit a better balance between price versus service. Librarians that don't see open source as a golden opportunity aren't going to take the chance on it at that price, though.

  And it is a shame. I like Koha a lot. The folks at Liblime seem really cool, and I'm sure their support is great. It's a tough market to break into. I'm just not sure that the pricing is where I would have set it. I don't have their financials in front of me. Maybe they're charging the absolute minimum to keep the lights on. But the fact is, without support from an outside organization, I can not put Koha on the machines where I am now. And we simply can't afford the service as it stands now, as much as I'd love to use it.

  [ Parent ]

• Re:Open Source, For Profit, Nightmare Upgrades?

  (Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Wednesday March 28, @01:40PM (#29349) "That means what could be years of custom programming, things you need it does not do and which the pinhead of a programmer can't conceive of and won't do except perhaps if you buy him that Porsche he's been wantin.."
  
  I'm flabbergasted at the ignorance and animosity on display here. Did a programmer kill your dog or something? You're actively bashing people who *volunteer* their time, efforts and expertise to make your life better. I don't know a single person who's gotten rich off of open-source software and I can guarantee you the people at LibLime are not charging what they do in order to get rich.
  
  And if you think programmers are pinheads, do it yourself. Seriously, I'd love to see what you've developed, and if you don't write code I wonder why you feel justified in calling people who can do something you can't "pinheads".
  
  Why do I get the feeling that if we were to do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address of your comment we would see something like "sirsidynix.com", "iii.com", or "tlcdelivers.com", and certainly not a .edu or .org? The eau de astroturf is strong in the air. Who else do you have issues with besides open source programmers? Adorable puppies? The peace corps? The neighborhood welcome wagon? The good samaritan who stops to help you when you have a flat tire?
  
  I would love to know what commercial library software there is out there that doesn't require extensive customization to each library's situation and which comes with all the functionality you could ever want right out of the box (or makes it easy to add new functionality WITHOUT access to the source code and without paying through the nose for custom development from the vendor). Yeah, that's what I thought. [ Parent ]

• Re:Open Source, For Profit, Nightmare Upgrades?

  (Score:1) by Anonymous Patron on Wednesday March 28, @03:49PM (#29351) Why assume a conspriracy if someone says anything negative, I think it's very likely some pro-OSS comments come from suspect sources as well. Just cause it's free doesn't make someone noble. [ Parent ]