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Comment by helmut_hed | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to hear more about this from the other side. Someone on the original thread has commented to the effect that the library permitted the contractor ("Katipo"?) who wrote the software in the first place to sell the IP to the people who are seeking the trademark... No idea if that's true, of course, and really, why try to trademark it in the place it came from? But still, I'd like to know more.

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There's a long, convoluted history of issues between the Koha community and Liblime over community 'assets', some of which is summarised here: http://lwn.net/Articles/386284/

LibLime acquired the Koha portions of Katipo Communications back in 2007, including the koha.org domain name and other assets. The Koha community subsequently had to move to koha-community.org.

"Had to" because Liblime stopped sharing access to the site, something which they had promised to do when taking over maintenance of it (get it in writing next time). Koha.org now exclusively promotes Liblime's non-open fork of Koha.

PTFS/LibLime's "non-open fork" of Koha is available on Github: https://github.com/liblime/LibLime-Koha. We gratefully accept pull requests and bug reports there, as well. We're pushing yet another release there next week.

Shortly after the acquisition of LibLime, PTFS offered up the koha.org domain for sale to several community members, including HLT and other vendors, as a means of hopefully rectifying the relationship with them. No one bit, so we've retained it.

Citation needed, can you point to evidence of this? Also ... this has nothing do with Liblime trying to trademark Koha in NZ.

Ask them.

If you think domain ownership and trademark have no bearing upon each other, I can't help you.

obelos is correct; one of the products supported by LibLime, LibLime Koha (LK for short), is periodically published to the shared GitHub link. The code in that repository is an older version of what LibLime's LK customers are running (4.2 versus 4.6 or 4.8). LK is, to the best of my knowledge, the extension of Harley, a Koha fork put out by PTFS several years ago. obelos: is the new version you're releasing next week 4.4, or something later?

There is also the close-source product, LibLime Enterprise Koha (LLEK), which I believe may have been rebranded as "LibLime Academic Koha". This software is a separate fork from LK, one started by LibLime before it's purchase by PTFS. The announcement can be viewed here: http://liswire.com/content/liblime-announces-liblime-enterpr...

So, PTFS/LibLime has both a non-open fork (LLEK) and a partially open fork (LK). As time passes, these forks diverge further and further from Koha (for example, Koha has since switched templating systems, which makes applying interface layer code from one to the other very difficult).

How about the "Koha Academic" product? Maybe that's the "non-open fork" the poster referred to.

What companies were offered to purchase koha.org - I never saw any such discussion on any open mailing list?

When you say get it in writing, you mean like this?

http://koha.1045719.n5.nabble.com/PTFS-Koha-Community-Suppor...

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