There is much talk in the United States right now, between conservatives and liberals about “values.” The conservatives feel that we’re compromising the values that made this country wonderful, and that the liberals are doing it, etc, etc, ad nauseum. I’ve watched that discussion with aloofness, because I’m of a third opinion altogether.
But my RSS feed threw this little tidbit about “values” at me yesterday, and I just couldn’t resist. Consider the values that make an open-source software project great–it varies, of course, but Eric Raymond established in The Cathedral and the Bazaar that what made them awesome was that they served some useful purpose, and people found it, and liked it enough to chip in and help. I’m okay with that definition, for now.
In Kier Thomas’s article, he moans a little about Firefox and Ubuntu losing track of those features that made them so incredible successes, and I think he may well be right. If so, I think it behooves every FOSS project–including Koha–to pay attention. What makes this project so great? If you’re not currently developing, that’s okay, but have you told someone who is why you use Koha? What value does it fill for you and your institution? What’s the slickest part of it, that impresses you and your staff?
As developers, we’re frequently isolated from the day-to-day users of the software we develop, so we don’t know what sorts of real-world uses you’re putting it to. It happens, from time to time, that we make obsolete some feature you like. Trust me, we’re not doing it out of meanness! Tell us about the things you love, as well as the things you think need work. We need to know these things, or we run the risk, as Firefox and Ubuntu seem to be, of developing toward our own idea of what you need–which is not always correct.
