I’m attending the NISO forum on collaborative library resource sharing, and heard a cautionary tale about making sure that a software project meant to be open source actually gets there.

Gail Wanner from SirsiDynix spoke today about the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative, an effort to revolutionize sharing of materials and services among libraries and their users. One of the products of the initiative was a Firefox plugin called GoGetter (previously known as GET-IT) that could grab information about a book from a web page and give the user a list of ways to get it, including online bookstores, the local library, resource sharing networks, Google Books, and so on.

A proof of concept was ready by June 2007 and was successfully demonstrated. However, work on it stalled — while the plugin was meant to be open source, apparently not all of the institutions involved in writing it (or employing the programmers involved) were prepared to let it go. Over the past year, various institutions have been signing off on releasing it under an open source license; while there’s been progress recently, GoGetter is not yet free. In the meantime, nobody has been able to play with it, improve it, or make it compatible with Firefox 3.

Lesson of the day: if you want to start an open source project, particularly if multiple institutions will be involved in writing it, it’s a good idea to make sure from the beginning that all parties are willing to release their work under an open source license.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 3:00 pm by Galen Charlton and is filed under Conferences, Libraries, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.