Singup page for communities

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jettl...@gmail.com

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Mar 4, 2020, 11:36:37 PM3/4/20
to AtoM Users
Hello, I am new to AtoM and I found it is good for research shared. I would to add sign-up page in frontpage to register as community. Is that possible?

Dan Gillean

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Mar 5, 2020, 10:45:45 AM3/5/20
to ICA-AtoM Users
Hi there, 

Unfortunately, the ability to register for a new user account does not currently exist in AtoM - at the moment, accounts must be created by an authenticated administrator via the user interface, or else via the command-line (for creating new admin accounts). Adding the ability for users to self-register would require development. 

There are some examples of community-developed plugins that we've seen that include this, however. One example is the State Records Office of Western Australia - they have a registration module so users can create accounts and submit reference or digitization requests. You can see their homepage here, and an example of the registration page here: 
You could always try contacting them via the details on their institution page to see if they will share the code with you. I suspect that it will still require development to make it work the way you intend to use it, however. 

Cheers,  

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056
@accesstomemory
he / him


On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 11:36 PM <jettl...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello, I am new to AtoM and I found it is good for research shared. I would to add sign-up page in frontpage to register as community. Is that possible?

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dgm...@gmail.com

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Mar 6, 2020, 2:23:58 AM3/6/20
to AtoM Users
El jueves, 5 de marzo de 2020, 16:45:45 (UTC+1), Dan Gillean escribió:
Hi there, 


There are some examples of community-developed plugins that we've seen that include this, however. One example is the State Records Office of Western Australia - they have a registration module so users can create accounts and submit reference or digitization requests. You can see their homepage here, and an example of the registration page here: 
You could always try contacting them via the details on their institution page to see if they will share the code with you. 




I am a bit confused. The source code should be freely available, shouldn't it? Doesn't the GNU Affero licence of AtoM require that modified versions of the code are made available to the users? Or this does not apply to community-developed plugins?

Daniel

Dan Gillean

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Mar 6, 2020, 10:42:02 AM3/6/20
to ICA-AtoM Users
Hi Daniel, 

Technically yes. We use the GNU Affero General Public License (A-GPLv3) in AtoM, which is considered a strong viral license - that is to say, it requires that any derivative work also be licensed under compatible licenses with the GPL. Therefore, plugins that can't be used outside of AtoM, and are intended specifically to extend AtoM functionality, should also be released under A-GPLv3 licenses. 

In practice, there are some challenges to enforcement and interpretation.  

The first is that technically the license implies that anyone using the software must have access to the source code. There's a bit of an interpretation question here - does that mean the staff of the institution who developed the plugin? Or, since it's a public-facing catalogue, does it mean anyone on the internet who accesses the site? Both arguments can and have been made around GPL licenses. 

More importantly perhaps is the question of enforcement. Artefactual is a small company that doesn't necessarily have the resources to pursue all possible violations - especially when it is likely an issue of internal resources or visibility, rather than malicious intent. My suspicion is that for most plugins out there, if you contact the institutions involved they would be happy to share - which meets the terms of the license. In other cases, the code may already be available somewhere, and we just don't know about it - again, something easily solved by contacting the developers or the institution responsible. We would not want open discussions about technicalities by reporting a violation when a simple email might solve things, and we would encourage others to do the same. 

I would hope that spirit of openness of the AtoM project would extend to its community of users and their related resources. In fact, it is generally beneficial to the maintainers of plugins to share - maintaining custom development requires time and effort (and therefore cost). The more people who use it, the more likely you are to have help maintaining the work. Further, if a broad segment of AtoM users were using a community-created plugin, that would be a strong argument for us to prioritize including it in a future public release. When we do so, Artefactual takes on the maintenance burden, ensuring the plugin will continue to work with future releases, receive bug fixes and enhancements, etc. 

More specifically: 

We did have some discussions with members of the State Records Office many years ago about some of their custom development (specifically, a Loans module), and whether it could be merged into a public release. At the time, we found much of the work was developed against older, unmaintained releases, and was quite particular to the needs and workflows of SRO-WA, rather than broadly useful and generalized for inclusion in a public release. Consequently, we would like to see further development done before merging it into a public release - something we cannot freely take on with every submission to the project (read more about our community development recommendations and requirements here). At the time, this wasn't something that SRO-WA had the resources to undertake. However, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be willing to share the code in its current form with other users willing to do that work. 

So for now, let's assume good intent :)

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056
@accesstomemory
he / him

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dgm...@gmail.com

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Mar 6, 2020, 2:16:50 PM3/6/20
to AtoM Users
Hi, Dan,

Thanks a lot for such detailed clarification! I have in the meantime seen a similar discussion about the corporate themes:


As I don't have that much experience with these licences, this is very useful. Your comment about the interpretations was also quite interesting. I had not thought about it.

Best regards,

Daniel


Karl Goetz

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Mar 13, 2020, 12:32:12 AM3/13/20
to Dan Gillean, ICA-AtoM Users
Hi Dan and Daniel,

I see Daniel found the previous discussion so its good to have these two tied together given how closely they are related.

I just want to comment on one passage from Dans email .

"
The first is that technically the license implies that anyone using the software must have access to the source code. There's a bit of an interpretation question here - does that mean the staff of the institution who developed the plugin? Or, since it's a public-facing catalogue, does it mean anyone on the internet who accesses the site? Both arguments can and have been made around GPL licenses. 
"
I'd like to point out that AGPL behaves quite differently to all other GNU GPL licences so shouldn't really be lumped in together with them when the question of network interaction is raised. The follow FAQ items cover - to a greater or lesser extent - the problem space here.

Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses. This page is maintained by the Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab. You can support our efforts by making a donation to the FSF. Have a question not answered here?
Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses. This page is maintained by the Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab. You can support our efforts by making a donation to the FSF. Have a question not answered here?

And like Dan, I encourage people to publish their changes so others can choose to benefit.

thanks,
Karl.

From: ica-ato...@googlegroups.com <ica-ato...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Dan Gillean <d...@artefactual.com>
Sent: Saturday, 7 March 2020 2:41 AM
To: ICA-AtoM Users <ica-ato...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [atom-users] Singup page for communities
 



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