|
|
As reported in iTWire yesterday, the Horowhenua Library Trust, the birthplace of Koha, is soliciting donations to try and regain rights to the name after Progressive Technology Federal Systems/Liblime obtained a trademark on the name Koha in New Zealand.
Koha is a Maori term that means reciprocity in giving.
Chris Cormack, who now works for New Zealand's biggest open source firm, Catalyst, told iTWire that the trademark had only been accepted at this stage and that the Trust had three months from the gazetted date - November 25 - to object.
He said his reaction was one of "extreme sadness tinged with anger. Sadness because it's such an utterly needless thing to do. Anger because, again, it's a needless thing to do, that causes a lot of ill-will and distracts people from the real task of creating a good free and open source software ILS".
Asked about the growth of the original project, Cormack that at present there were 159 developers from around the world who had committed code to Koha.
"Joshua Ferraro, the person who started Liblime and who sold it to PTFS, was the 27th person to commit code, in June 2003. But then he was working for Athens County Public Library, in Ohio. It wasn't until April 13, 2005, that Liblime came into the Koha world. Koha 2.2.2 was released on April 8, 2005."
Cormack said that in 2007 he and two others from Katipo Communications went to work at Liblime, starting on April 1, 2007. By then, 45 people had committed code to Koha.
Katipo was the company which was hired to build the integrated library system for the Trust back in 1999 as the existing system was both old and not Y2K-compatible.
"By about September of that year (2007) it became clear to us that Liblime was heading in a direction that wasn't good for the project," Cormack said. " We had all left Katipo to work at Liblime because that would allow us to work on Koha full-time and we honestly thought it would be good for the project.
"Hindsight is 20/20. When it became clear that our protests were falling on deaf ears, we resigned on March 2, 2008. (A total of) 54 distinct people had code in Koha by then."
