LibLime Koha is Chosen by the Guggenheim Museum

Re:Open Source, For Profit, Nightmare Upgrades?

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.