What's in a name?

 Lemoene, 4 January 2018  

We were naive starting out in 2002, the Internet rocks still soft, when we named both project and company risking the start-up 'Bika', inspired by indigenous South African diversity. Later, difficult to quantify, BLS'  influence on the project was starting to put new prospective developers off.

Work that reached the Bika collective were subcontracted among the core devs or propositioned together. The distributed professional Bika LIMS teams on their own then grew strong enough to independently bid on LIMS contracts, and the laboratories did not get that we were equals. 

With the same name, either the project or founders' company had to change moniker.

Earlier, Bika's Froid, Free Open Instrument Middleware and Android Samp, Free and Open sampling App proposals adopted a vendor neutral convention already.

FOSS companies' equity almost entirely resides in their brand, the software is free. For the professional services model to work for them, service organisations require visibility, nobody really spends on marketing.

Bika Lab Systems had seven to ten times more sweat invested than any other group in Bika LIMS and the BLS board resisted a name change without this loss being addressed. Unjust given BLS carried all start-up risk and massive subsequent sweat investment. With lab prospects, the new ACME LIMS would've stood no chance - lab managers as a rule don't read code. 

Odoo pulled off a Project name change very successfully over the past 2 years and there is every reason Senaite will do the same. The code is in the hands of the next energetic generation, and built on Bika LIMS after all.

Today

The journey has come full circle. Bika assisted with refactoring, migrated our clients, and continue to contribute to Senaite, which has been superbly improved since, under rigorous quality control and release management.

What sets Bika LIMS apart is its extensive enhancements and the dedicated support of Bika Lab Systems - a team with deep domain expertise, having perfected laboratory solutions since 2002.

Alongside the Senaite modules, we’ve bundled a collection of powerful add-ons, commissioned by forward-thinking laboratories and developed and maintained by Bika.

Primarily, there are no differences between Bika LIMS and Senaite. They share the same free-to-use public licence, modular architecture and primary features, the same modern UI and robust API, and the same free upgrade path that comes with Senaite’s evolution.

The enhancements include instrument interfaces, COA templates, a bulk sample importer, two-tier sample point locations, billing, queue management, time-series plots, and a range of smaller yet impactful refinements - advanced LIMS at its most affordable.

See the latest release's Readme