Contribute. Cattle or Code

Cattle

Ngunis kicking up dust at sunrise

The mainstay of pre-colonial African currency, with inherent value, a primary manifestation of abundance. Used till today by men paying lobola when asking for a daughter's hand in marriage

Development Sponsorships

Labs with the foresight to invest in and sponsor FOSS, are instrumental in Bika LIMS' advance

Professional, or inhouse, Bika developers are contracted for customisations at industry rates, 100 -125 USD ph, based on gap analysis and specification

Donations

Considering how much labs gain by using Bika for free, depressingly little is collected as donations. When it did happen, this commitment by donors, led to strong client partnership relationships

Very little is often needed to provide essential but small customisations to under sourced labs in remote locations  

Win

Big Viral Marketing

Labs funding big new features score significant SE weight and viral seeding via Bika pressers, news items and user group discussions

Cost sharing

Often labs have the same needs and by bringing them together, development and training costs can be shared for the benefit of all

Merging requirements is instrumental in evolving Bika's best-of-breed design

Code

Best contribution ever is your well-structured customisation program code, its robot tests and user documentation. By far

You'll have the added benefit of rigorous user testing and it being put to use, supported and enhanced

Code Analysis

Before migration to the Senaite repos, deprecated Bika 3.2 code then, analysed by Blackduck Open Hub:

Very high activity, 55 Contributors. Well established, mature code base. Large development team, an estimated 42 years of effort, worth $2,29M...  

Premier Sponsors

Advancing Open Source LIMS

Bug reports

Few FOSS users realise how much developers appreciate good bug reports

The bulk of the Bika Senaite code now has robot tests that are run with each new commit, and no new code is accepted without them, but human testers uncover bugs that helps to mature systems quicker

Please post both feature requests and bug reports to the Bika Issue tracker. Fixes are included immediately in upgrades

Your donation helps keeping Bika free

Love of liberty keeps Bika LIMS free. Please sustain the project

Feature and Improvement requests

It is a good idea to also highlight new feature requests in posts to the user list for discussion

Through logging feature requests users indicate to Bika designers and developers how the system can be enhanced

Aggregating these delivers FOSS' best-of-breed designs. Where users have similar requirements, they are combined to lower the cost of the customisation through co-sponsorship

Translations

It is relatively easy to translate the Bika interface and dictionary of terminology through the web interface at Transifex where a number of teams are working on translations