Found via Library Web Chic:

Packt Publishing which publishes some wonderful books on open source software. In addition, the sponsor awards for open source CMSs. Nominations are now for their open source CMS awards. There are several different categories in which CMSs can be nominated. For more information check out the award page on Packt’s website.

We have until September 11, 2009 to place our votes for our favorite CMS.

This is pretty awesome:

After weeks of controversy concerning a possible closure of the service, URL shortener Tr.im just announced that it’s open sourcing its code, handing ownership of its domain name over to a community nonprofit organization and making clickthrough data freely available from now on, in real time.

I wonder if this will make Tr.im more or less appealing than TinyURL and bit.ly.

I just read this post by Thomas Brevik and I have to say I have never thought of sending a resignation letter to a vendor But I love the image!!

Today I sent the resignation letter to our current ILS-vendor. The point of NO return has passed:-)

It promted another round of “OMG why am I doing this?” It is in many ways a leap of faith. We are the first library in Norway to switch to Koha, the translation is still not completely done and who knows what bugs and surprises we will get when we go live sometime in October. This would of course be true independent of the system we switch to, commercial or open source. The important thing for me, who initiatet the whole thing, is that with Koha we are looking forward, we will get more features than our current ILS can deliver or develop in the forseeable future, and we introduce the concept of open source into the norwegian library systems marketplace.

So this is my call to you to resign from your current ILS and give Open Source a shot!!

Okay, so I’ve never used the products that William Shields mentions in his blog post, but the theme still applies. One of the biggest worries about open source is the lack of documentation. I attended a conference last year where one of the attendees asked the speaker about documentation and open source - her concern was that there wasn’t enough documentation for many of the products she wanted to use. Of course I had to follow up after her and say that Koha has amazing documentation (no - I’m not saying that cause I wrote the manual - there are actually a lot of docs that I didn’t write for Koha as well). Anyway, William Shields expresses his frustration with lack of documentation on open source products:

RTFS

This one is predictable. Some will argue that the source code is sufficient documentation. Bollocks to that. While at some point it is inevitable you will end up reading or stepping through the source code of any framework or library you use for any non-trivial purpose, the fact that you have the source code is no substitute for high-level documentation that describes the overall architecture and design principles as well as how to get started and how to do common tasks.

DIY

Another popular defence of poor OSS practices is you can get involved and do it yourself. While theoretically true it is typically completely impractical. For one thing, before you can document something you have to know it. How do you learn it without reading the (non-existent) documentation?

I’m with him on this - it’s bollocks! Not everyone using open source is a programmer - some are just average folks and they need documentation - documentation written in English (or their native language) not programmerese. For that reason, I try to only recommend products that have readable documentation

My husband thinks I’m nuts because I love keeping catalogs of our books, movies, music, etc etc. I use LibraryThing for my books - and love it to bits, but if you want to catalog your other collections you might want to try out some of these open source applications that I found on OStatic:

• Tellico - This KDE app comes with handy templates for managing your book, wine, video game, coin, or stamp collection.
• Griffith - Keep your movie collection in order with this app that automatically grabs film information and cover art from the Internet.
• GCstar - Designed for use on systems with gtk2-perl, this app helps you maintain all kinds of collections from stamps to mini-vehicles.
• Alexandria - If you need a simple app to manage your monstrous book collection, then check out this Alexandria for the GNOME desktop.
• Sisimizi - This Windows-only video game database app comes packed with lots of handy features including a scripting system to fetch game info from the Internet, customizable data fields, and loan manager.

Learn more here.

What’s your full name (middle name too)?

Maria Elena Laude

What is your official Job Title?

Application Support Librarian

Did you (or do you) have a nickname?

Not that I can share in public.

What’s your favorite color?

Blue

What’s your favorite food or meal?

Sushi  - The Tampa Roll

What’s your favorite word (keep it clean)?

CHOICE.

Are you a dog or a cat person?

Big Dog, definitely.

Do you have any pets?

I’m on the road too much to have any pets that would still be around when I get home!

Why did you want to work with LibLime? 

Because of Marc Roberson  :-)   But seriously, because the company is doing exciting things with technology and has broken out of the mold (and moldiness!)  of big “Corporate America”.

What did you know about open source before taking on this job?  

Not much.  But I sat next to and had a delightful conversation with Eric Raymond last year!

What have you learned since taking the job?

I have learned how to use a Mac for the first time in my life. And  I’m learning that open source requires some patience and acceptance of how dynamic development can be, and that sometimes you have to be a little flexible.

What’s at the top of your wishlist for the next version of Koha?

New developments should be supported for both Firefox and IE.  There are just too many libraries out there using IE to ignore it.

If you had all of the skills, time and money, what open source application would you like to develop? 

I would like to get more resources devoted to Koha.  The possibilities are endless if the resources were available.  The software is great now, but imagine all the little tweaks and enhancements we could build into Koha if more money and people were available for development.  We would put all those “other vendors” right out of business.

What are your top three favorite websites?

• pandora.com
   
• xkcd.com
   
• www.madsci.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~lynn/jardin/SCG

What would you do if you won the lottery?

After paying off my debts, I would love to open a non-Starbucks coffee place.  But this would be a 24-hour coffee and wine bar, with plenty of seating areas and wireless access (of course!), live music, subdued lighting.  A place you can go in the morning for your caffeine, and in the evening for your nightcap! 

Are you an organized desk person or a messy desk person?

Organized. I’m so organized that sometimes I delete things and realize I should have kept them!

Anything else you want our readers to know about you?

I’m not your typical librarian.  But then again, I don’t think any of us at LibLime are!

Yesterday I read this awesome post by Kirrily Robert about being a woman in open source. This post is a summary of her talk from OSCON about standing out in open source as a woman.

So what does it feel like to be a woman in open source? Jono Bacon, at the Community Leadership Summit on the weekend, said — addressing the guys in the room — that if you want to know what it’s like to be a woman in open source, go and get your nails done at a salon. He did this a week or so back, and when he walked into the salon he realised he was the only man there, and felt kind of out of place.

Another example someone suggested is walking into a sports bar on game night wearing the wrong team’s jersey. It can be the most friendly sports bar in the universe, but you’re still going to feel pretty awkward.

So as a woman in open source, it can be a bit like that. You walk into a space, and you feel like you stand out. And there’s enormous pressure to perform well, in case any mistake you make reflects on everyone of your gender.

I haven’t felt this way in the Koha community - which says something great about the people involved in Koha - but I do sometimes feel like I know less than the others on the project because I can’t program in Perl and submit substantial patches. One way Kirrily recommends making women and community members in general feel welcome is to thanks them for even the smallest of contributions - once again - something I have seen done in the Koha community plenty of times!!

Value all contributions.

Large or small, code or docs or bug reports or organisational tasks. All are valuable to your project. Say “thank you”. You don’t have to be the project leader to do this; anyone can do it, and it makes a big difference.

The entire post is well worth reading even if you think your project is creating all participants equally.

I am a Google Office user because work has Google Apps for us all, but maybe I should start using Google for work and Zoho for home. In a post by Matt Asay he talks to Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho. He notes that the back end of Zoho is completely open source.

Could Zoho.com exist if it were built with proprietary software?
Vegesna: Technically, we could do the same thing with proprietary software but the cost would be prohibitive. Imagine Google trying to run 600,000 servers on Windows. Could it do so technically? Probably. But it’s doubtful that it could give so many different services away for free if built on pricey, proprietary software.

Without open source I can’t imagine SaaS [software as a service] taking off. The economics simply wouldn’t work.

Open source gives us flexibility so that we can add our own layers of business logic. For example, we use OpenOffice for document conversion. There are some conversions that OpenOffice doesn’t support, however. Because it’s open source, we can split the code to allow our proprietary software pick up the slack where OpenOffice can’t handle transformations.

Most of our applications are built from the ground up by Zoho. Ninety-five percent of our employees are engineers. We use open source strategically but we need to be able to understand our code intimately, so writing it ourselves is important.

We use the best of open-source software, contribute back strategically, and write our own software where it makes sense.

Awesomeness! Read the entire post here.

A few months ago I was asked to come to Norway to give a keynote on openness and libraries. Now I’ve learned that at least one library in Norway is on the right road

Thomas Brevik, librarian at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy (in Bergen) selected Koha for his library. He selected Libriotech to help him out with this project : Libriotech is a company recently created by Marcus Enger, who starts on his own for now. I had been in Norway in February to meet up with Magnus, who was thinking about starting a business with Koha there at the time, and to also meet several librarians interested in Koha. We talked about our experience with Koha in France, and about the ways in which BibLibre might help Koha flourish in Norway.

This from BibLibre. Very cool.

As for me - I will be in Norway in November to sing Thomas’ praises and talk about openness in libraries.

I have often written about governments and open source alternatives, today I found an organization that is trying to encourage open source software use in the US government:

Open Source for America (OSA) is an effort to raise awareness in the U.S. Federal Government about the benefits of open source software. We hope to encourage the government’s utilization of open source software participation in open source software projects, and incorporation of open source community dynamics to enable transparency.

…

Open Source for America includes a diverse cross-section of technology industry leaders, associations, non-governmental organizations, communities and academic/research institutions.