[Evergreen-governance-l] Evergreen library system: application to the Software Freedom Conservancy

[Dan Scott]

Hello:

My name is Dan Scott, and I am one of the core developers and long-time
contributors to the Evergreen open source library system. On behalf of
the Evergreen community, I would like to submit the following
application for membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy.

   * Detailed description of the project.

To quote from the project home page, the Evergreen library system is
"highly-scalable software for libraries that helps library patrons find
library materials, and helps libraries manage, catalog, and circulate
those materials, no matter how large or complex the libraries". 

The project began in 2004 when the Georgia Public Library Service found
all of the existing library systems, open source and proprietary, unable
to meet its performance needs, and invested funds in developing a free
software system that would meet its needs and offer a solution for other
libraries as well.

In 2006, the first version of Evergreen went live in the State of
Georgia, and in 2007 celebrated several significant milestones:
  * the second major deployment of Evergreen went live in British
Columbia
  * the project had its first major contributions from outside of the
original development team (http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=96#more-96)
  * the original developers of Evergreen formed a for-profit company to
offer support and services for other libraries
http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=99)
  * the project gained its first committer outside of the original
development team (http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?p=100)
  * the Georgia Public Library Service won the Mellon Award for
Technology Collaboration (MATC) for its work on the Evergreen ILS
(http://evergreen-ils.org/blog/?m=200712)

Since then, the community and the project has been steadily growing,
both in adoption and in terms of contributions to the project.

   * FLOSS License(s) used by the project

Any new code that the project creates is licensed under the GNU General
Public License, version 2, with the "or later" clause.

In some cases we have bundled code that is provided under a more
permissive license, such as the New BSD License. If we modify any 3rd
party code, such as the DP_DateExtensions.js, we maintain the copyright
and license headers and include comments on what was modified.

   * Roadmap for future development.

Our roadmap is currently very much focused on the next release, 2.0,
with a beta due at the end of September 2010:
http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=faqs:evergreen_roadmap

The roadmap is a living document, and after our IRC community meeting on
September 7th, I expect that there will be further development plans
fleshed out for the subsequent release(s).

   * Link to the website.

Both http://evergreen-ils.org / http://open-ils.org resolve to the same
site.

   * Link to the code repository.

The Evergreen source code is available from svn://svn.open-ils.org/ILS

The OpenSRF source code (OpenSRF provides the communication
infrastructure on which Evergreen is built) is available from
svn://svn.open-ils.org/OpenSRF

A Trac instance links to both repositories from
http://svn.open-ils.org/trac

   * Have you ever had funds held by the project, or by any individual
     on behalf of the projects?  How and for what did you spend those
     funds?

As was noted above, the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) was
awarded the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC), worth
$50,000. GPLS invested the funds in hiring technical writers to create
documentation for the project.

There have been two Evergreen conferences, one hosted by GPLS in Athens,
Georgia, in 2009, and one hosted by the Michigan Library Consortium in
2010. Funds for these conferences were held by the hosting
organizations, but the conferences are very much part of the overall
project. GPLS has money from the 2009 conference (approximately $2000)
that they hope to contribute to the foundation when the structure is
finalized.

   * Brief history of the project, including past governance decisions.

The Evergreen project was created by the Georgia Public Library Service
(GPLS) in 2004 and employed all of the initial developers and systems
personnel. GPLS currently holds legal collateral such as the Evergreen
trademark and logo and still holds a significant proportion of the
copyright over the Evergreen code base. Shortly after the Evergreen
International Conference in 2009, Elizabeth McKinney of GPLS announced
their attention to form a non-profit legal entity to hold these assets
on behalf of the broader Evergreen community
( http://markmail.org/message/h2k7wpjncfvixvim )

In practice, since the project began focusing on being applicable to
libraries outside of GPLS, most project decisions have been made by
gaining the informal consensus of interested parties via the mailing
lists and/or the IRC channel. This is, for example, how the decision to
switch from CVS to Subversion occurred; how bug and enhancement tracking
went from a Bugzilla instance to a read-only Trac instance to an open
Launchpad instance; and how we have set up conference site selection
committees. People who define a problem in the project and offer to
provide a solution are generally given whatever power we can give them
to achieve their goal.

At the Evergreen International Conference in 2010, Elizabeth McKinney of
GPLS solicited participation from a broad set of representatives to go
forward with forming that Evergreen Software Foundation. Many
discussions of potential governance models and membership structures
have been held since then, and there is overwhelming support to seek a
membership within the Software Freedom Conservancy while continuing
these discussions. We understand that the Software Freedom Conservancy
has experience in setting up governance structures with open source
projects, and if the Conservancy accepts our application we would
welcome your insight and suggestions.

   * Existing for-profit or non-profit affiliations, funding
     relationships, or other agreements that the project or its leaders
     have with other organizations.

Most of the committers to the Evergreen and OpenSRF repositories are or
have been employees of Equinox Software, Inc (http://esilibrary.com).

Dan Scott, one of the committers to Evergreen and OpenSRF, holds a
full-time position as a systems librarian with Laurentian University,
although as of September 2010 he will be seconded to a full-time
Evergreen development position within the "Project Conifer" consortium
of university libraries, college libraries, and special libraries across
the province of Ontario ( http://projectconifer.ca/ ). Dan also runs
Coffee|Code Consulting, a sole proprietorship that has offered Evergreen
development and training services since early 2010. All materials that
Coffee|Code Consulting produces are made available under the GNU General
Public License and / or the Creative Commons-Attribution-Share-Alike
license.

The King County Library system (Issaquah, WA), in partnership with the
Galecia Group (Petaluma, CA), won a $1 million IMLS grant in September
2009, entitled “Powered by Open Source.” King County has partnered with
six other library systems to provide a peer-to-peer support model for
open source libraries. The grant-funded website for their open source
project, RSCEL (Resource & Sharing Cooperative of Evergreen Libraries)
is at http://rscel.evergreen-ils.org.

   * Names, email addresses, and affiliations of key developers, past
     and present.

http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=contributing:contributors
lists all of the committers, along with all of the people who have
contributed patches to the project since its inception. It also links to
the list of participants in the Documentation Interest Group.

   * Information about any past for-profit or non-profit organizational
     affiliations the project has had.

In 2006, GPLS contracted the development of the initial SIP 2.0 support
(realized in http://openncip.sourceforge.net/ ) through LibLime
( http://liblime.com ), who subcontracted the work to David Fiander.

Evergreen was one of two free software library systems that participated
in the Electronic Information For Libraries Free and Open Source
Software (eIFL-FOSS) ILS project:
http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-foss/ils/ils-project-workshop Dan Scott travelled to Armenia in June 2008 to provide pro bono training to representatives of libraries in transitional countries.

Lyrasis (formerly Solinet) helped organize the 2009 Evergreen
International Conference and offered Evergreen training and other
services at http://www.lyrasis.org.

Finally, on the subject of contributing a percentage of our funds to the
Conservancy, our group has not yet come to a decision on that matter. I
will raise the subject with the governance group again and provide an
update if we reach a consensus on that subject.

If you have any questions, of course, please feel free to address them
to me at dan at coffeecode.net.

Many thanks,
Dan Scott