will OSS impact library automation?

[Eric Hellman]

I was browsing though the program for the "e-libraries" conference in 
May (NYC), and I saw this statement in the abstract of a talk by 
Marshall Breeding, "Library Technology Officer" at Vanderbilt:

       " The Open Source movement has stirred a lot of discussion, but 
it will not make a huge impact in
          library automation"

I suppose one terribly unfair translation of this is "Although most 
libraries will run web servers on Apache, listservs on something else 
free, databses on MySQL and much of the the code will be written in 
Perl, library administrators should continue to focus their attention 
and money on getting proprietary systems to do what they want them 
to."

Obviously, he doesn't mean to say "Perl will not have a huge impact 
in library automation" but rather something like "Don't expect to see 
gnuOPAC anytime soon".

Eric
Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           21st Century Information Infrastructure
Openly Jake- the library of the future                http://jake.openly.com/