faq.md

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• Why was the original Bauble project started?

  At Belize Botanic Gardens people felt that the other collection management software was either too expensive, inadequate or only supported Windows so they decided to create their own.

• But why for free?

  Wait: when we state that Ghini and Bauble are free software, we speak about freedom, not about price. Bauble and the whole Ghini family are copyrighted and distributed under the GNU Public License. You are free to use, study, alter, and to pass it to a colleague or a friend, but you will grant others the same rights granted to you.

  Said this, the authors acknowledge that commercial collection management software is economically out of reach for most institutions, save the largest ones in a few countries. Bauble/Ghini contribute to providing unrestricted access to management of information related to biodiversity.

• So again, is there a price attached to Ghini/Bauble?

  If you are able to download, install, configure, and learn using (and the documentation explains all of it), then Ghini is being offered free of charge, for the simple reason that you're not costing time nor effort to the Ghini people.

  If you need help to do any of the above, we are professionally available, and the cost we generally compute related to what you can pay, and to wages in your own country.

• What's this GNU Public License?

  Ghini and Bauble are not just free as free beer, they are free as free speech. The GPL license introduced the concept of Copylefted and guarantees that the freedoms you are given with the product will stick to the product for ever. The GPL answers the question "what if someone makes it proprietary": only the owners of the copyright can do that, and Ghini has already no less than 10 authors.

• How can I contribute to development?

  This is a question we love hearing! You can hire a Bauble/Ghini developer for a short project, targeting at adding some features to it. Or you can send money to the developers, because money does not stink. Or you can contribute code and/or ideas. Anyway this would start by contacting a developer and talking about it and check with their availability.

• I found a bug. What can I do about it?

  For bug reports, but also for technical and generic questions, don't be shy, get a github account and file a bug report.

• I can read English but my colleagues want to have it in our own language!

  Fine, we can fix that, will you help? Both software and documentation are hosted on weblate.

  If your language is not listed, tell us: adding a translated is a routine activity, and the initially empty translation will be available less than 10 minutes after we commit the change.

  Translations in the documentation will be (almost) immediately visible, while those in the software have to wait until a next release.

  Weblate is a courtesy of Michal Čihař, author of the very user friendly weblate translation support software.

• What other resources are available?

  Let's list all of them, whether we have mentioned them already, or not.

  Users and potential users possibly most interested in:

  [home page], [user manual], [user forum], [ghini.web - live],

  Sources (Developers want to look inside):

  [desktop - sources], [web - sources], [pocket, sources], [tour, sources],

  Videos (Undecided people want to see it in action):

  [installing on Windows], [installing on Linux], [batch insertion], [importing a pictures collection], [on-the-fly taxonomy check], [query status resume], … [many more].

  Quality (Worried about Quality Assurance):

  [travis-ci], [coveralls],

  Translations:

  [translations].