Maybe I'm missing something here but isn't this company's entire marketing strategy is that of openness and open source software. Medsphere seems to be sending conflicting messages over how committed they are to open source saying words like proprietary code. Medsphere's proprietary platform OpenVistA sounds more like an oxymoron. I truly believe that the executives had no intention of really making Medsphere's VistA open or open source.

From reading their brochure, I thought that they were using an open source subscription type model for generating revenue. Why the big fuss over releasing OpenVistA client code so that it could be truly open?

This company is making it look as if they are very unstable and is giving the impression to the public that it is divided, riddled with internal conflict at the core, and may not be around in the near future. Suing the founders would scare the hell out of me if I were considering contracting Medsphere to handle my medical facility's critical data and systems. They should have just handled this internally and had the code removed off of sourceforge quietly instead of getting lawyers and the courts involved.

Alfred Smith

• Re: Not good for public perception of company. by Eishay Smith on Thursday August 03, 2006 @ 12:09 AM

  Nowhere in this article I saw any reference to any problem Medsphere has with open sourcing the OpenVistA. Don't know about Jumps and Kickstand, but they are not necessarily part of VistA. A company may be invested in open source but still has some intellectual property which is not open source. Is everything redhat is doing is open source?

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• Re: Not good for public perception of company. by Fred Trotter on Monday August 07, 2006 @ 10:33 AM

  While the may have and use proprietary software internally, Redhat does not publish any proprietary software in its products. The fedora description reads... The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source project with the goal of working with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Its pretty annoying that they do not provide a patent encumbered mp3 player in fedora, but that is indicative of a commitment to FOSS. Also indicative is the fact that CentOS exists. CentOS means that RedHat has its money where its mouth is. By your analogy Oracle would be a great Open Source company. After all, you will find them very willing to provide you with a FOSS operating system on which to run their very proprietary database. The question is what kind of company is MedSphere. They tout themselves as a "RedHat" but they sometimes seem to be an "Oracle". I am hoping for a "RedHat" thats what the community needs. Fred Trotter

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