RedHat Enterprise is the same as RedHat free (see centOS). RedHat just add guarantees and support.
That's different with LibLime: their fork contains a lot of unpublished features. LL said they will release the code, but don't specify when, or how. Every experienced developer knows that a raw source code is useless.

(Note: i work for BibLibre, the other major Koha contributor, still contributing and not planning to change their minds ;-) )

I'm glad this is finally out in the open and we can talk about it as a community. There was a lot of whispering for a long time. Thanks for this.

Roy, you were doing great until you got to the canard about RedHat. I've heard that FUD as well--as someone said to me, "It took a lot of coding to turn Linux into RedHat!"--but it's FUD all the same.

One big difference with RedHat is the size of the community. I don't think LibLime, or any library software, has enough people participating in it to _afford_ a fork. We need the synergy of more people working on it, even though in the short-term coordinating the work of people in different locales and organizations is a royal time-consuming pain.

Has LibLime anywhere announced this and said WHY they're doing it? I can find everyone except LibLime themselves talking about it.

What an incredible slur against LibLime.

You even admit that all of the code being written by LibLime is destined for the public, but that doesn't stop you from putting it right out there with "LibLime To the Koha Community: Fork You!" Shameless.

And instead of reporting on facts, you just reiterate someone's opinions. Anybody who goes to www.liblime.com/news/liblime-announces-liblime-enterprise-koha
will see this:

'"Just to make one thing crystal clear: All of LibLime's development efforts will be available to the library community under an open-source license," says LibLime CEO, Joshua Ferraro. "These are process changes, not philosophical changes. As the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, LibLime is 100% committed to the open-source movement."'

As someone who has participated in and benefits directly from the library-directed and librarian-spec'ed enhancements coming from LibLime, I know the library world will be a better place for it.

...And that's *everyone*, not just some small collective of programmers who refer to themselves as "the community."

Also

article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.misc.koha/16033

So if everything LibLime does continues to be released as open source.... What are people angry or concerned about?

Do they not trust that LibLime is going to follow through on that?

Are they upset at the added inconvenience of having it be open source, but LibLime no longer spending their own resources to get it combined with the common codebase as quickly as before?

What's up? Not enough information. If nothing else, LibLime has not handled this well from a PR perspective, but it's still not clear to me that LibLime has done anything blame-worthy, or done anything that will cause a significant problem for the rest of the Koha community. It's just unclear.

I have no idea what is actually happening with LibLime/Koha. That said, the GPL allows anybody to keep source changes to themselves if the binaries are not distributed. This is interpreted to mean that hosted services do not distribute binaries. This is a big issue in the larger F/OSS community.

(I know the Koha people know this, but I think it is useful for others to know.)

If you are concerned about this issue, there is at least one license (Affero general public license) which requires modified code to be published if it offered on a hosted site.

Whatever LibLime is actually doing - if they will be publishing the code on a timely basis or not, if the code will be useful or not - they are certainly within their rights under the GPL to not publish changes. I understand why people inside the Koha community would be upset about this, but this is hardly a new development. Google would almost certainly not exist if they hadn't done exactly this.

re Ben Ide's comments:

Liblime may have issued a lovely press release saying they will make all the code they write available to the public but there are ways of doing that which make it next to useless to the community. A really positive and reconciliatory step would be to make their Git repositories public like so many other developers - including other commercial Koha vendors.

The Koha community is a vibrant and representative group, not dominated by programmers (when they suddenly become evil?) but with programmers and librarians, vendors and clients, professionals and amateurs working together in a spirit of community. Koha 3.0 would not be anything like what it is without that immense body of cooperation and goodwill which is the Koha Community. I have never chatted to you in irc, or discussed ways to solve a bug. or co-funded an enhancement of yours, read an email to the list from you so perhaps you are not a participant in the community. You should try it sometime!

This decision can be devastating for the libraries on the verge of "going open source". If liblime "forks" Koha, why would another company selling services around Koha not do the same ?.
How can we (librarians) argue with our institutions to promote Koha now ?

Ok, it's legal..
so what ?

I can hear all the comments around about the difficult choice we made in my library to take KOHA : "so, in the end, you will get handcuffs just like before, with your so-called free software.."

DLG, from some large public library in France