This was a requirement and the library put it in the contract. And sure enough, as soon as the money changed hands, the company reneged on the requirement (because integrating anything with Banner is not a trivial task).
I really hope the college sued for some money back. Too often libraries (and other orgs.) just role over and play dead when this happens and they keep getting burnt. Lets face it, was proprietary ILS vendor has your money, they have you pretty much locked in die to the cost (in money and time) associated with migrating to another system.
There is at least one company that well provide support, Liblime. I find the whole "we need support" argument many make a but of a cop out covering the fear of change though. Especially considering the amount of money the proprietary ILS vendor's give the average customer for the support they actually provide. In many (most?) cases, these fees can easily cover your costs for a local developer or consultant.
What you're saying is not so cut and dry. You only pay once if you never want it updated (unless someone else wanted it updated for some reason and did it and they did the same updates you wanted). If you want updates, you'll need to get (and pay) someone to do it for you. That's the same with Open source or if you contract someone to write a program for you under a different license.
Actually, new versions of RedHat don't even run on Sparc, let alone on the Solaris. You can still run and download older versions, but RedHat stopped releasing new versions for Sparc.
If you want new versions of Linux for Sparc you need to go to someone besides RedHat.
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This was a requirement and the library put it in the contract. And sure enough, as soon as the money changed hands, the company reneged on the requirement (because integrating anything with Banner is not a trivial task).
I really hope the college sued for some money back. Too often libraries (and other orgs.) just role over and play dead when this happens and they keep getting burnt. Lets face it, was proprietary ILS vendor has your money, they have you pretty much locked in die to the cost (in money and time) associated with migrating to another system.
There is at least one company that well provide support, Liblime. I find the whole "we need support" argument many make a but of a cop out covering the fear of change though. Especially considering the amount of money the proprietary ILS vendor's give the average customer for the support they actually provide. In many (most?) cases, these fees can easily cover your costs for a local developer or consultant.
What you're saying is not so cut and dry. You only pay once if you never want it updated (unless someone else wanted it updated for some reason and did it and they did the same updates you wanted). If you want updates, you'll need to get (and pay) someone to do it for you. That's the same with Open source or if you contract someone to write a program for you under a different license.
Actually, new versions of RedHat don't even run on Sparc, let alone on the Solaris. You can still run and download older versions, but RedHat stopped releasing new versions for Sparc.
If you want new versions of Linux for Sparc you need to go to someone besides RedHat.