OpenBiblio might be a good fit. It's written in PHP and uses MySQL for its database engine. It was very easy to install, and I have it working on NetBSD, GNU/Linux, and several versions of Windows. Since we put it in, we've gotten a constant stream of good comments from our patrons and our library personnel -- mostly about how easy it is to use.
Now, I should point out that I'm a developer on the OpenBiblio project, so I'm probably biased. But I think it's surprisingly good. We don't quite have the feature set that Koha has, but the code is much more approachable, if you need to modify it.
I began using OpenBiblio because no open source library software did what the libraries I'm working for needed. It had the basic feature set, without a lot of extra fluff to get in my way. And the code was straightforward enough that I could modify it to fit my needs pretty easily. No other library system I looked at had quite the right mix. It's certainly not perfect, but we're working on it. I think it's a serious contender.
OK. There are so many posts now that completely miss what factotum is about that I feel like I have to clarify. I don't claim to be an expert, but I've used Plan 9 as my main desktop OS for the last couple of years and have used factotum for authentication every day for the last several months (that is, since its public release).
Factotum does not require that you store your passwords anywhere. If you do store them, you can put them where you like --- i.e. an encrypted file on your hard disk, a secure server elsewhere that you access via an encrypted connection, a smartcard, whatever. What factotum does do is talk all of the various authentication protocols on behalf of the various service programs. This way a given auth protocol can be implemented once and all the other programs can use that implementation. This is no more a "single point of failure" than a shared library. Even if you store your passwords, it's no more of a risk than storing your ssh private key encrypted on your computer. There need not be any third party involved.
As to factotum being an alternative to Passport or Liberty Alliance, yes, it could be used instead of either of those. But if either or both of those became popular, they could be implemented as just another authentication protocol that factotum supports. Factotum is not an auth protocol, it's a method of implementing and managing authentication in a networked system.
The real beauty of factotum is its simplicity. The entire Plan 9 factotum implementation is just over 6000 lines of C. A lot of that is just the various authentication protocols (it supports 10 or 11 different protocols right now). If you remove that code, then the basic factotum service is only around 2500 lines. If you have to trust some software, I'd rather trust simple software. It's easier to debug and easier to verify.
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OpenBiblio might be a good fit. It's written in PHP and uses MySQL for its database engine. It was very easy to install, and I have it working on NetBSD, GNU/Linux, and several versions of Windows. Since we put it in, we've gotten a constant stream of good comments from our patrons and our library personnel -- mostly about how easy it is to use.
Now, I should point out that I'm a developer on the OpenBiblio project, so I'm probably biased. But I think it's surprisingly good. We don't quite have the feature set that Koha has, but the code is much more approachable, if you need to modify it.
I began using OpenBiblio because no open source library software did what the libraries I'm working for needed. It had the basic feature set, without a lot of extra fluff to get in my way. And the code was straightforward enough that I could modify it to fit my needs pretty easily. No other library system I looked at had quite the right mix. It's certainly not perfect, but we're working on it. I think it's a serious contender.
http://obiblio.sourceforge.net/
OK. There are so many posts now that completely miss what factotum is about that I feel like I have to clarify. I don't claim to be an expert, but I've used Plan 9 as my main desktop OS for the last couple of years and have used factotum for authentication every day for the last several months (that is, since its public release).
Factotum does not require that you store your passwords anywhere. If you do store them, you can put them where you like --- i.e. an encrypted file on your hard disk, a secure server elsewhere that you access via an encrypted connection, a smartcard, whatever. What factotum does do is talk all of the various authentication protocols on behalf of the various service programs. This way a given auth protocol can be implemented once and all the other programs can use that implementation. This is no more a "single point of failure" than a shared library. Even if you store your passwords, it's no more of a risk than storing your ssh private key encrypted on your computer. There need not be any third party involved.
As to factotum being an alternative to Passport or Liberty Alliance, yes, it could be used instead of either of those. But if either or both of those became popular, they could be implemented as just another authentication protocol that factotum supports. Factotum is not an auth protocol, it's a method of implementing and managing authentication in a networked system.
The real beauty of factotum is its simplicity. The entire Plan 9 factotum implementation is just over 6000 lines of C. A lot of that is just the various authentication protocols (it supports 10 or 11 different protocols right now). If you remove that code, then the basic factotum service is only around 2500 lines. If you have to trust some software, I'd rather trust simple software. It's easier to debug and easier to verify.
Micah Stetson