KohaCon13: The Koha History

by Nicole C. on Oct 16, 2013

Chris Cormack and Paul Poulain were up to talk to us about the history of Koha next at KohaCon13.

• Sept 1999 – “It’s just a big database how hard can it be”
• Jan 2000 – Koha released to library
• Sept 2000 – Koha released as open source to the world
• May 2001 – People from non-English speaking countries started to work on Koha
• 2002 – A very busy year
  • Koha 1.2 is released along with tools to foster collaboration (Wiki & Bugzilla)
  • Translation tools needed
  • MARC support needed
  • The first elected management team was put in place
• 2003 – A new team was elected
• 2003-2005 – The addition of MARC support, Serials, Statistics, Advanced OPAC and bulk importing of records in to Koha
• 2006 – The first KohaCon in France (which actually started out as an invite to a presentation and exploded)
• 2006-2007 – The road to 3.0
  • Needed a new search engine to scale well for larger libraries that were interested in Koha – Zebra
  • Moved from sourceforge to savannah and then git
  • A mailing list was created
  • A French Koha site was started
• 2007-2010 – A hard time to explain and a hard time for the Koha community – “Open Source is Stronger”
  • In 2007 in LibLime bought Katipo Koha activity and domain name
    • Soon after a company called PTFS joins the Koha world and LibLime cries “danger”
    • Something happens at LibLime and they decide to stop sharing – which is strange because they were great sharers before
    • A lot of LibLime developers/employees resign
    • LibLime announces LibLime Enterprise Koha – a hosted-only version of Koha where the code is not shared – this was legal because of a hole in the GPL2 license
    • The community now loses access to the official Koha website
    • Sometime after this PTFS says it will buy LibLime – and then it pulls out – and then it does buy LibLime
    • The community moves from the original website to the now official koha-community.org website
  • The consequence of this crisis was that there was a delay in releases and the developers spent more time dealing with this instead of hacking
  • In short this hard time made open source stronger! It has proved that no one can steal the software – the software evolution doesn’t depend on a single company’s success or decision!
  • Paul says: “Alone you go faster – together we go further”
• 2009 – KohaCon09 in US
• 2010 – KohaCon10 in New Zealand
• 2010-2011 – Changes made to the workflow – monthly IRC meetings, well defined patch workflow, QA managers reinstated, and many many new contributors
• Apr 2011 – 3.4 was the first time based (every 6 month) release
• Oct 2011 – KohaCon11 in India and Koha 3.6 released (365 bug fixes and improvements from 3.4)
• Apr 2012 – Koha 3.8 released with many improvements including a new look and feel for the staff interface and 130+ enhancements and fixes
• Jun 2012 – KohaCon12 in Scotland
• Nov 2012 – Koha 3.10 released with 160 enhancements and new features including a mobile friendly theme and 433 fixes
• May 2013 – Koha 3.12 released
• Oct 2013 – KohaCon13!
• Nov 2013 – Koha 3.14 (Pi) will be released!