Multi lingual:
We are multi lingual, first of all you can add in a matter of 3 hours in ANY
language, we have staff in house who could quickly do Spanish and French,
but in the meantime we are adding in Chineese, Swahili, Russian and a few
others. Main thing is that we have added the ability in from the start so
that those of you who like to take our stuff and work with it can do so,
this is a big DIFFERENCE most opensource software, although the abillities
exist to write the code so that you can localize, don't do it, we designed
it on purpose in from the beginning.
How many of you are out there supporting a library OPAC with a significant
population of users who's first language is for example Spanish in the US?
and provide that type of access?
MySQL - there are some reasons we use it, mainly because of some text search
capabilities built into it which makes searching in the notes fields a build
in MySQL function rather then a set of "outside DB engine" code.
Further there is a GOOD version for the NT/WIN2k platform, allowing
libraries partiularly in the US easily to deploy it on a platform they most
likely allready have sitting around in many cases idle. O.k so who wants to
attack that, my god we are not OpenSource pure - Linux only :) We amy even
do OS-X for the mac...:)
Ultiamtely DB choices are like MAC versus PC versus Linux wars, everyone has
there favorite hip flovor of the day, ultiamtley you pick one and go to
work, in my opinion, no matter which DB you pick there is ultimatley
something you end up hating..:)
For all others on the list, we are likely going to lay low for a long time
and not respond to mush OSS4LIB comments, but rather finishing of what we
started. Not that we take suggestions not serious, but those who have true
suggestions know how to find us directly.
List serves have an incredible tendency to become a time suck about not
much, and we rather keep coding and testing and building an application for
the real poor parts of the US and world. Same reasons you did never hear
anything uptil now, because we do not want to get side tracked from the real
work at hand, which is building a tool for which people and organziatione in
poor parts of the US and the world are screaming out.
For us this is not some "purest" battle about code or principals of some
design phylosphy some group may have but rather about the power of
technology to do real things with it, ulitmately if some one does not like
it they are welcome to go and purchase a piece of software with propriatary
code deliverd in obscure binary form tight to a specific hardware platform
sold by same vendor for a high premium and pay a 1000% markup on any minor
change you may like, like for example adding spanish language as an
interface option.
In my opinion the beauty of Opensource is that people have freedom to decide
again there own destiny if you like it take it adn improof it, if you don't
like it leave it alone, but if we as community are not careful, Opensource
will die as an option rapidly, because of our own desire as community to use
it always to critize or shoot down any effort to push something out as a
creative opensource solution. This is particularly dangerous for the
library community, because on one hand they need this option but at the same
time the contineous battle for "purity" and highly inflamed religeous wars
around projects, makes them extremely nerveous about picking and choosing an
opensource option as solution to a problem they are trying to solve.
So clearly some peole will now feel highly flamed and feel the need to
reply, or comment, that is fine, we will just go back to "lurking" like many
others, and finsih writing code.
Hapy coding all.
-W
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Cunningham
To: Willem Scholten; 'Daniel Chudnov'; Dave Bretthauer
Cc: oss4lib-discuss@...
Sent: 6/23/2001 8:18 PM
Subject: RE: [oss4lib-discuss] ala report?
Hi all,
At 09:06 AM 6/22/01 -0700, Willem Scholten wrote:
>OpenBook, as we say is inspired by Koha. We started out with the KOHA
base
>release and did a number of things we contributed back, some of those
>include: Multi Lingual user interface and advanced search system. WE
would
>never have consider doing OpenBook or anything like it if there was not
KOHA
>to start from.
>
Multilingual interface? I had a quick look at OpenBook, a very
interesting
project, but it would appear that its interface is severely restricted
to a
mall set of languages. From my point of view, when i refer to a
multilingual iterface, i assume the interface can handle Arabic,
Persian,
Syriac, CJK, Vietnamese, Tamil, Hindi, Thai, Amharic, Tigrigna, Urdu,
etc
*shrugs* just that in this part of the world, when you refer to
something
as multilingual, then you could be asked to support virtually any
language.
From memory, OpenBook is using MySQL. Seems that MySQL is being used in
a
lot of projects. Any particular reasons for using MySQL rather than
other
databases? Considering the unicode development of MySQL is rather
underdeveloped?
Just a few comments based on a very brief look at the product.
Andj.
|