-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Lee Braiden wrote: | On Monday 14 March 2005 17:57, Richard Smith wrote: | |>If you can't find a free database front-end that meets your needs, and |>you have 2 grand to spend, I'm sure you could hire someone to write one |>for you. | | | Agreed. For the price of a software license, you could pay someone to get an | Free Software project started, which would be free forever, and is likely to | be appreciated and enhanced by many similar organisations.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't a good starting point out there because many collections are held by public bodies, and some public bodies make software available under free software licences, or licences which if not "free software" embody at least some of the values of the free software movement (the US federal government being one such body).
John,
Search engines are your friend, but you need to know what to look for....
Look for US gov organisations ".gov" ".edu", and organisations ".org", as well as UK organisations and education ".org.uk" ".ac.uk".
Also check out bodies like UNESCO and the MDA.ORG.UK to see if they have any ideas.
Include licence hints to narrow searches, i.e. +GPL
With this bit of free software know-how I hit on "museolog" as the first candidate for you to check, GNU GPL, UNESCO funded development, Postgres and Apache TOMCAT (yes it is written in Java, which I think is a feature but may create some free software issues, depending how well it runs on free Java implementations - or you might be prepared to use proprietary Java if purity of licencing isn't your main goal).
Doesn't look terribly active development, but there have been a couple of point release since 4.5 in 2003 judging by the tar balls, so maybe someone loves it. Probably helps to speak Russian given their original target audience but everything I saw was in English, and I think Museolog maybe a German "pun".
Another one requiring MS Access and very quiet of late... http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcm-f-access/
It may help to know what sort of collection it is - as I couldn't track down if University of Kansas still support OzLab for natural history specimens.
Probably the MDA is the place to start, but a lot of the people working on Museum collection classification at Univerisities seem to have gone on to release proprietary software. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFCNjkaGFXfHI9FVgYRApGDAKCYSsKmqKJum4iUErReMmFIhDKF3gCgiUWN Ycds3vh/Ztgnk31MY0ZU+fA= =8Kr4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
