This is what I’m talking about, techies

Does someone have a camera in my house?

This is an official follow-up to my previous rant about how free online content management systems assume a level of technology in its end users that is entirely unreasonable and that makes this kumbaya-open-source concept almost completely inaccessible to the little guys.

Our little museum has a large library that we want to catalog and make easily searchable through our website. Having no money, we look to free open-source web options like, for example, LibLime Koha. Now, I want to emphasize that I understand what FREE means: If you want everything your way right now, you have to pay. I get it, I really do. But PLEASE give unsuspecting end-users a warning on your software’s home page before getting them all excited only to have them find this gem in the “download” section:

[begin quote]

“Getting Started

LibLime Koha is developed in Perl, with embedded Javascripts and HTML templates. LibLime Koha 4.2 uses Debian as the operating system, the Apache HTTP server, and MySQL as the underlying relational database. When installing Debian, select MySQL as your RDBMS server – our download includes the database schema necessary to support LibLime Koha. Specific installation instructions are included in the download package.

You should also have root access to the server, you should have a reasonable level of comfort working with Linux at the command line level, and a general understanding of database structure will also help. “

[end quote]

Are you freaking kidding me? Really? In this age of technological accessibility, we can’t do any better than this? Yes, yes, I’m whining about something that’s free–I get it, okay!!! If I don’t like it, why don’t I learn programming, yada, yada, yada.

Fine, tech snobs. Have it your way. We’ll probably end up paying one of you handsomely to perform a ritual interpretation of the above mumbo-jumbo for us anyway, so you win in the end, as usual. But do not call your downloads EASY if they aren’t–at least be honest about it.

That is all.