The same drawbacks that plague many of the smaller Open Source projects, I suspect. First is the irregular pace of development. Since Koha code development is a “spare time” activity for most of the programmers, the pace of Koha’s growth is hard to predict. We found ourselves waiting for CRUCIAL MODULES to be developed, sometimes wondering if they ever WOULD be developed, often suspecting that the answer to our original research question would be “no” – we couldn’t switch to a completely Open Source system.

The second is the problem of “splintering.” If we took the developing Koha code and finished it to FIT our needs, hard-coding the features we needed and leaving out things we didn’t need, we would have in effect created a new VERSION of Koha that had departed from the main development tree. That would mean that we could not take advantage of future upgrades to the main tree.

The same drawbacks that plague many of the smaller Open Source projects, I suspect. First is the irregular pace of development. Since Koha code development is a “spare time” activity for most of the programmers, the pace of Koha’s growth is hard to predict. We found ourselves waiting for crucial modules to be developed, sometimes wondering if they ever would be developed, often suspecting that the answer to our original research question would be “no” – we couldn’t switch to a completely Open Source system.

The second is the problem of “splintering.” If we took the developing Koha code and finished it to fit our needs, hard-coding the features we needed and leaving out things we didn’t need, we would have in effect created a new version of Koha that had departed from the main development tree. That would mean that we could not take advantage of future upgrades to the main tree.