[Web4lib] RE: Open source support models

[Dan Scott]

2008/7/11 Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com>:
>> software support that's worth something costs something. No argument there..
>
> That seems right, but you can get support for many open source
> products without paying. When an open ILS acquires the same sort of
> community around it that something like Perl or Ruby has, you'll be
> able to get at least most of your support from the community.
>
> If getting your support from a community sounds like "getting your
> thursdays from a banana," you need to hear Clay Shirky's talk on open
> source and love:
>
> http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/10/video-clay-shirky-on-love-internet-style/
>
> As an extension, I think Shirky's logic and example offer long term
> succor to those Open Source ILSes built in newer languages. There are
> a lot of Ruby hackers reveling in love for one another and for their
> language. C++ is just a different cultural phenomenon. Perl, as Shirky
> says, has a lot of love behind it, but it's on a long-term decline. So
> too is PHP, my language. This is good news for Project Blacklight
> (Ruby), mixed news for Koha and VUFind (Perl and PHP respectively) and
> bad news for Evergreen (C++?).

Ha! Fact-checking is readily available for a few of these projects at
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/evergreen/analyses/latest (for
Evergreen) and http://www.ohloh.net/projects/10977/analyses/latest
(for VUFind).

So a correction: the business logic of Evergreen is written primarily
in Perl and SQL, with a few optimized sections rewritten in C. The
current catalogue interface is primarily JavaScript with XHTML, and
the staff client user interface is written in Mozilla XUL (XML +
JavaScript). The user interface for most new staff client
functionality is being built with the Dojo JavaScript framework.
Python is used for the internationalization build infrastructure and
for the new EDI piece.

The choice of language in the project largely comes down to using the
most appropriate tool for the job. That's one of the advantages you
get from building an application using a service-oriented
architecture.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University