Support Services

There is no fee involved with the installation and use of any of our open source software. You may use it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) under which all of the open source software available from the SFU Library has been released.

We currently offer two levels of support for groups using our open source software:

1. Community Support
We will try to answer fairly straight-forward questions from the open source community about installing and configuring our software. Due to our limited resources (we are part of a publicly-funded, non-profit university library ourselves), these cannot become too specific, in-depth, or time-consuming for our support team. When we think a particular query is beyond these free support parameters we will inform you that it may be necessary to address it as paid support (see below).

We have a public support forum, and you can see how the questions and answers are beginning to develop:
http://lib-forums.lib.sfu.ca/

We encourage everyone to create an account and post questions (and answers!) here.

2. Commercial Support
Our software is always free and open source, but with our hosting and support services, we will assist a client with more in-depth questions to get the software installed and operating. Our services are available either for an annual fee, or based on individual customizations at an hourly rate. Details are provided on our Fee-Based Hosting/Support page.

All of our software has been developed to operate either for a single library or in a consortial environment.

We are very interested in collaborations with institutions or organizations that are serving multiple libraries, and aim to become the leader in using our software in a particular region.

One of our goals is to transfer our technological expertise to partners in the open source library community, and to foster their technological independence and enhance their ability to contribute back to the project in a variety of means (such as code contributions, documentation, answering other people's questions on the support forum, etc.).