Karen Carden from University of Arts London talks about the Pros and Cons of open source in their experience.

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SeesawWithKids_bw.png
PTFS Customer Day 2018
Moving to open source: reflections on
the UAL experience three years on

2. https://catalog.archives.gov/
© CopyrightRights Advisory Public Domain

4. “There is an impression that Open Source
systems are, by definition much cheaper than
vendor systems. I think most potential OS
clients/users tend to forget about, or gloss
over, the support implications. This impression
is rooted in the slightly utopian vision of the
OS community of developers and hackers,
who apparently just do bug fixes for the love
of it and because they like the feeling of
contributing to a better, caring, sharing world”
“It’s just that customers of OS systems
feel as if they have more influence in the
direction of development. In reality, OS
customers still have to wait for things to
get into the ‘community’ version, unless
they want to pay for their own
customisations”
“The idealism and energy of
Open Source communities
doesn’t always translate into
getting your ideal system and
how, to get your ideal system,
you have to pay for it, whether
you’re using the Open Source
model or the vendor model.”

5. “I don’t see huge
differences to data skills in
a proprietary versus an
open source application”
“Being hosted with no server access
means we have not needed to acquire
(buy in) or develop skills in XSL / XML /
XSLT. No server access means no perl
skills have been needed. No server
access means no apache / tomcat skills
have been needed- I had developed
some skills in these (quite hazardous)
areas in Voyager”
“The lack of a nice (graphical) interface
to assist in query writing has been
challenging. Voyager used ODBC- open
database connectivity- where the query
was put together diagrammatically and
the SQL was generated in Microsoft
Access (in a hidden but accessible way
if that was required). The data in Koha is
queried using raw SQL and the
development of SQL skills is
challenging and at times very time-
consuming”

6. https://www.flickr.com/photos/idesignwebsites/7397572836/
“Well my biggest feeling is that it’s
amazing to be able to tweak and
customise our system to be
exactly what we need, and it’s why
open source won over the bigger
names. But you need to beware of
jumping down that rabbit hole”
“Supporting this open source
application appears to me to be
much harder work that managing
a proprietary LMS. Part of the
problem is managing
expectations. Users know
‘everything’ is possible, so we are
asked for lots of things that would
not be tolerated in the proprietary
model pathway as the suggestion
/proposal is not on the ‘product
pathway’”

8. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boy_working_machine_for_fixing_tags_to_boot-laces._Wellcome_M0013542.jpg/
“The temptation to endlessly
‘fix’ everything can create a
burden on resources you didn’t
plan for as it spirals into a never
ending list of customisations
that all have a knock on effect
somewhere, not always
predictably!”

9. “I know it is good that we can have bug
fixes on our own instance of Koha … It is
quite unsettling not knowing if any bug fixes
applied will break anything else, or cause
any new behaviours – we have already
seen a few! … Sometimes we are alerted
to these changes by colleagues and it’s
hard to backtrack what could have caused
them, understand them, and then create
new workflows”
“My own experience is that usually
products that are out the box are already
tested and upgrades come ready tailored
for the customer to some extent so need
minimum checking, but obviously in
open source it is a different experience
and so we need to be prepared and I
certainly had not expected us to need to
do such extensive checking”

11. “I love that it looks and feels like a
normal web page not a ‘system’”
“Its great to speak to library
colleagues and not have the
same system as all the others!
Makes us feel like radicals and
pioneers!”
“I think it fosters a sense of
ownership in all its users rather than
a mangers’ management tool that is
imposed on staff (fewer restrictions
on changes)”
“I’ve always liked the fact that, if
there has ever been a
misunderstanding on either our
side or the side of PTFS support
staff, in dealing with an issue,
there has always been a
willingness to get to the bottom of
the misunderstanding.”
“I do like the ‘approachability’
factor of an outfit like PTFS … it is
genuinely nice to deal with people
who have similar professional
backgrounds to ourselves and who
are motivated by similar goals and
outlooks, rather than dealing with
small cogs in a large, corporate-
capitalist machine.”
Own work by W.Carter, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54641760