by I’ve been asked about this many times over the past couple of weeks, so I figure the word is out. And, so I can clear out about a dozen emails in my inbox, I figured I’d post the definitive answer here:
Yes, the Evergreen project, by way of GPLS, has been approached by the Mellon Foundation.
We are still in the preliminary stages and are exploring what such a relationship would entail, but there are many exciting possibilities. Mellon, which has made a commitment to support only open source projects, is very interested in supporting the ILS space and has been looking for a way to help for some time. In their words, they selected Evergreen over other ILS’s because it is based on a highly-scalable, service-oriented enterprise-class architecture. We’d consider that a ringing endorsement!
Where do we go from here? One thought is to construct a software development consortium of like-minded affiliates to collaborate on Evergreen development. The thought is to include both public and academic libraries in this group. And like everything else we’ve done with the project so far, the existing community will play a big role in whatever happens on this front — we don’t want to disenfranchise anyone in the community, or slow the momentum we’ve built up.
Also, on a related note, there is the idea of Evergreen and the XC project working more closely together.
I will update the community as things develop and progress on this front.