Hiya Everyone,

I'm a bit worried this message could be seen as being too commercial, so
I'll keep it as brief as I can and hope people will contact me off list
if this is seen as in appropriate. If on the other hand, this is
something we should be discussing on the list, I'm more than happy to
keep the conversation here, just let me know.

I was really interested in Ericas email mid Feb looking for alternatives
to ILLOS and felt interested enough to contact the ILLOS team directly,
having spoke to Andrew Hartland, I felt (With Andrews OK) that it was
best to contact the list directly.

(Bit of background) For a long while now I've maintained and supported
an open source (GPL) ISO ILL messaging engine called OpenRequest. This
library was originally supposed to make it easy for ILS vendors to
implement the ISO Messaging system without needing to understand the
complexities of the protocol. Our business idea was to have an open
source system which we would then charge vendors support for (The old
Open Source Support based model). We've worked with a few system
suppliers to integrate the toolkit (And it's been used in some *very*
large scale deployments by some of the vendors listed in Ericas
"Alternatives" email.

We have spoken with the ILLOS team in the past about the possibility of
integrating OpenRequests ISO ILL messaging with ILLOS but nothing ever
really came of the talks. When I heard the sad news about ILLOS reachine
the end of it's life, I asked Andrew if the ILLOS team might consider
Open Sourcing to provide a migration path to current users. I might be
interested in contributing to / supporting an Open Source ILLOS variant.
One of the things OpenRequest has always lacked has been a real end user
interface (We have toys to get implementors started, but usually
integrate with existing front ends).

It seems unlikely that the ILLOS team will be able to open source their
code due to institutional licensing restrictions. However, I'm still
interested in the possibility of looking at putting a usable interface
on the front end of OpenRequest. Obviously this is only an exploratory
question at this stage, but I wondered if anyone might be interested in
being involved? I guess one thing we could perhaps do is look at
migration tools for ILLOS users.

Sorry for the stream-of-conciousness but I'm trying to find some more
definite shape for these ideas. Happy to set up a small community to
discuss off list if there is any interest, or to carry on here if thats
appropriate, or to just let it die if people think it's a bad idea.

Cheers for reading

Ian.