> From: [...] H.M. Gladney
[...]
> See "Speculation about Faster
> Progress towards Digital Repositories" in the Digital
> Document Quarterly
[...]
From that note (which I think is entirely fair):
"Borghoff identifies more than 70 non-commercial repository offerings.
Why are there so many? [...] Given the lip service paid to sharing open
source software, this situation is bizarre."
I'm sure there are plenty more that are presently under the radar
because they were abandoned before being sufficiently complete to
register.
My take on this: Not-Invented-Here syndrome is rife in the commercial
world and in the open source world; and, unfortunately, it cuts both
ways. An institution biased toward development may feel that it can
solve its own problems more rapidly by developing something specific
rather than by adopting and adapting an existing system. Also, the
well-established systems are understandably wary of code that is
contributed to solve an institution's specific needs - they don't want
to incorporate that code and maintain it, and the institution doesn't
want to have to track new versions of a product in order to integrate
their own changes with each new and subtly incompatible release. So,
yet another slightly different system is developed, simply so that the
maintainers feel that they have some kind of control over it.
Is this sensible? Probably not. Is it human? Undoubtedly.
- Peter
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