This afternoon, rather quietly, I posted the first release candidate for Evergreen 1.2.0 on the Open-ILS.org download page. This is a big milestone for the project and for the developers. It’s also a big milestone for those interested in adopting Evergreen outside of PINES. The 1.0 series was pretty heavily skinned for PINES, with the images, rules, and default configuration, and new backend features were slow to be incorporated due to the pain of updating the database schema. The shiny new 1.2 series removes almost all traces of PINES-specific images and default rules, and contains many new backend improvements. It is also the first non-experimental release to include a significant amount of code not created directly by GPLS and PINES.
ALA Presentation Pics and Slides
The Evergreen presentation at ALA was a huge success… a little too successful, in fact. Many folks had to be turned away after the room filled completely up. Here are some pictures of the event, courtesy Lamar Veatch, Georgia State Librarian:
Also, here are the slides from the presentation.
ALA; Open Source is not a distraction
I had a great time at ALA, and obviously, I perked my ears whenever the topic of open source came up (which was a lot). I found it interesting that everyone seemed forced to agree that open source was a good thing, whether it was as infrastructure that even proprietary vendors made use of or as a mechanism or culture for sharing innovations between libraries. But also interesting was the back-handed compliments and spin that would follow those admissions.
PINES was “mostly successful”. Did that mean we only “failed a little bit”?
Open source needs high caliber programmers? How many developers have proprietary companies been laying off lately?
Open source isn’t mature. Could we also claim that the “mature” products out there actually fossilized?
Open source is free as in kitten. Is closed source non-free as in goldfish?
I’m being glib here, but no more so than my counterparts.
Lastly, it was said we should focus on something larger than open source, and that we should be concentrating on open data and standards. And that’s true enough; but what was not said is that open source is your guarantee of having open standards and open data. Source code is the lingua franca of the computer world, and without it your data could not be accessed, and your standards could not be implemented. If you have open source, you have the other two. If you don’t, all you have is promises.
— Jason