Biblibre has announced a demo of their SOPAC/Koha installation on their blog. The post was in French, so I’ll summarize for you.
You can access their very awesome demo online at: http://demo.sopac.biblibre.com/. It is important to remember this is just a test install for us to test and for them to play with - so if you have comments as you poke around, be sure to contact them and let them know what you learned.
There is a great article in the recent Code4Lib Journal release about developing open source applications. How Hard Can It Be? : Developing in Open Source by Joann Ransom with Chris Cormack and Rosalie Blake talks about the process of developing Koha:
In 2000 a small public library system in New Zealand developed and released Koha, the world’s first open source library management system. This is the story of how that came to pass and why, and of the lessons learnt in their first foray into developing in open source.
Make sure you read the entire thing to learn all about the Koha project.
Technorati Tags: koha
This week I took the plunge and bought a Blackberry Storm. I’ve been looking at the apps available and came across this open source announcement I thought you might be interested in. I signed up for Brightkite a while ago, but don’t really use it because I never think about it - but maybe if I have a mobile device I will … and it’s open source so I have to give it a whirl right??
BrightBerry, which is available here, has been quite the hit with our community — offering most of the basic functionality that makes Brightkite on the go so much fun.
Currently, you can use the app to:
- View and navigate your streams (Friends, Nearby, Universe, Mentions, and User)
- Post a Note to your current location
- Check in to Placemarks
- Send and receive Direct Messages
- View and post comments on a post
You can also check-in via GPS and via Place Search, but both of those still need some tweaking. This is a big undertaking for one person, so Chris has decided to make the app open source and we’re hoping that there might be a developer or two out there with some free time that would be willing to contribute.
I’m all for not using Windows at all 
but if you want to keep using Windows and want to try Ubuntu, Wubi might be the answer for you.
Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier!
Wubi is Simple
No need to burn a CD. Just run the installer, enter a password for the new account, and click “Install”, go grab a coffee, and when you are back, Ubuntu will be ready for you.
Wubi is Safe
You keep Windows as it is, Wubi only adds an extra option to boot into Ubuntu. Wubi does not require you to modify the partitions of your PC, or to use a different bootloader, and does not install special drivers. It works just like any other application. Wubi is free of spyware and malware, and being open source, anyone can verify that.
This from Open Road:
If you walk into the headquarters of open-source leader Red Hat, you’ll see this quote from Mahatma Gandhi gracing the wall:
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.…
Forrester Research has crafted its own “Five Stages of Open Source Adoption,” as published recently in the May 15, 2009, edition of SD Times, which roughly follows the same pattern of doubt-giving-way-to-adoption that Gandhi suggested
Very very cool
Dave Shields has been using his blog to run his campaign for a position on the Board of Directors of the Library in Chappaqua, New York and has a very interesting post about who all open source developers are in fact librarians and authors.
For example, as an author of this kind of software I am known as an “open source developer.” We developers collect each set of related files into collections called “packages.” Individuals, groups, or, in some cases, companies, aggregate these packages into what are called “distributions,” or more colloquially, “distros.” Red Hat is an example of a distribution, as is SuSe. Debian is a distro created by open source developers that is also used as the base for Ubuntu, a widely-used distribution that has developed an extraordinary community of supporters, advocates, and experts.
That is the accepted view. Here is my view as an amateur librarian.
Every developer is an author producing copyrighted work that is available at no charge.
Every package is a “book” in what I have previously termed the “open source artifact.”
Most developers base their packages on prior art, and they often include parts of other packages in their new packages. This is not allowed in conventional publications, but is a matter of course when preparing a software package, due to the way in which these packages are licensed.
Developers are thus, for the most part, both authors and librarians.
Whether you agree or not, it’s a neat way to look at things - and I’m all for getting an open source developer/enthusiast on the boar of directors for a library
Nicole Burchfield, aka Librarian, Interrupted asks why libraries are spending so much on licenses for software from Microsoft:
Why do libraries spend thousands of dollars a year on Microsoft Windows licenses for pc’s that are only used for access to the internet?
….
These computers often do absolutely nothing except provide access to the internet. So why not use Linux? And while we’re at it throw some open source software on there like Gimp and Open Office? All free, all useful to patrons - how can this not be the right thing to do?
I commented noting Howard County Library which is going completely open source - but there are several other libraries out there doing this very thing. I teach classes all over the country on open source and I always tell librarians that making the switch on their public PCs (if not all PCs) to Linux and all open source software is a great option. They get more security for less cost and they get to say that they support open source! What more could you want?
As many of your know, I’m traveling a lot lately - well that’s because I’m out there teaching librarians about open source. Here are my upcoming open source talks:
Hopefully I’ll see you at one or more of these talks.
I am reading an awesome book right now - Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe. I has read through bits of the book a few months back while waiting for my hubby to pick up a new RPG and liked what I saw.
Howe talks about the movement we’re seeing on the web these days - the movement from a few experts working in their field to thousands of amateurs working in many fields. The book itself is well worth reading cover to cover, but the part that I’m clinging to is the correlation between crowdsourcing and open source.
Crowdsourcing has it genesis in the open source movement in software. The development of the Linux operating system proved that a community of like-minded peers was capable of creating a better product than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Open source revealed a fundamental truth about humans that had gone largely unnoticed until the connectivity of the Internet brought it into high relief: labor can often be organized more efficiently in the context of a community than it can in the context of the corporation. The best person to do a job is the one who most wants to do that job; and the best people to evaluate heir performance are their friends and peers who, by the way, will enthusiastically pitch in to improve the final product, simply for the sheer pleasure of helping one another and creating something beautiful from which they all will benefit. (p.8)
There are many great passages like this throughout the book and that’s why I’m recommending it to those who attend my open source classes as a way to learn about open source without having to read the techie books (which are also great - but sometimes hard for librarians to wrap their heads around) like The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In addition to learning about the community and philosophy behind open source, readers will learn to understand the way people are interacting with information on the web - and the fact that librarians aren’t the only experts out there - we need to start tapping into the knowledge and skills that are locked up in our patrons.
Richard Stallman has a very interesting post entitled Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software that talks about free software versus open source and the origins of the terms and their philosophies.
Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution.
Free software. Open source. If it’s the same software, does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak about “free software.”