Jon Gorman <[log in to unmask]>
> There's vendors/companies that develop for and support Koha.  Open
> source and vendor/commercial activity are not  mutually exclusive.

Yes, exactly!  I work for a commercial vendor (software.coop) which
has done all of the following combinations:
> Open Source ILS / local servers / no support contracts
> Open source ILS / hosted / no support contract
> Open source ILS / hosted / support contract
> Open source ILS / hosted / no support contract

We've even done Open Source ILS / local servers / multiple support contracts.

Someone else mentioned Marshall Breeding's ILS survey.  It has some
numbers, but I don't think they cover all of the above situations (so
we encourage most co-op libraries to report as Independent if at all),
as I comment almost every year (along with suggesting that having the
survey open-sourced could offer big improvements).

> And you could distinguish between support and development contracts,
> with the nice advantage of open source you can always change vendors
> or fund someone who's not your usual developer group depending on how
> the community around the project has been established.  Harder to do
> that with proprietary software, but I've still heard of it happening.

Even with open source, you have to make sure that you can export and
import your data.  Most vendors that support Koha-community.org do
offer that, in support of the Open Network Libraries idea.

Hope that informs,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/