Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking, listening, venting and pondering changes and rumors regarding our Koha vendor, LibLime. Well, the news is finally out and they’re calling the new (forked) project, LibLime Enterprise Koha. I’m not sure how this will impact NExpress, but it’s pretty disheartening to know we’ll have to choose between this LibLime version of Koha and the Community version. Guess we will have to wait and see. For more drama, visit #koha on IRC or search for #koha on twitter.
lybrarian 
No, not forked. Everyone else will get the same improvements that LibLime creates (for free).
On the contrary Ben, LibLime has only promised to publicly release the version which LibLime creates–not contribute patches–after an unspecified period of testing. They have not promised (or even indicated) that they would work to make these changes part of the official version of Koha. The result is “my way or the highway.” Either you pick the LibLime version or the official version. The two will be incompatible.
That’s a fork.
But there is a big question of how and when those improvements will be made available. See this post: http://library-matters.blogspot.com/2009/09/liblime-forks-koha.html and the comments here: http://blog.bigballofwax.co.nz/2009/09/12/the-koha-community-retains-its-documentation-manager/ for some views on that.
While this is technically true, it’s not practically true. Sure, liblime can dump a tarball on the community at any time, but the effort required to integrate the changes over the long term increases exponentially. This means, at some point it will become too hard to integrate the features, and a future RM may decide to exclude those features contributed by liblime. This has the unfortunate side effect of limiting innovation in both versions, though less so for the community version, since there are many more eyes, hands, and brains on that code. It’s a global community of impassioned developers vs one relatively small company.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and an OSS project is no different. It takes a community to fulfill the promise of OSS, and currently it looks like we may have to go on without a once proud and integral member of our community. It’s a real shame. I don’t have any doubt, however, that another entity or group will step up and provide that leadership role.
But when? And how? As a tarball dumped in our lap or (better) from a public git repo?
Of course it’s better that the code going into koha gets tested first, but it still has to be integrated, something that becomes much harder as the branches diverge.
Ask LL for a public repo. Ask for your features to be released to the community as soon as they are tested and approved. Community Koha will thank you. You will thank you, as developers on every continent look at your features and fix bugs.
We can make this from a lose-lose into a win-win for all involved. We just need the right people to ask.