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  Outing Patient OS
Interesting Developments Posted by Fred Trotter on Saturday December 01, 2007 @ 09:28 PM
from the interesting-developments dept.
Dear LinuxMedNews,

Recently it has come to my attention that the PatientOS project has been representing itself here, and in other public forums, as a legitimate FOSS EHR project. In fact, Patient OS is attempting to fracture the FOSS EHR developer community. I have written an article on why I believe this is the case, including what I mean by a "legitimate project" entitled, FOSS Sin: Pointless Duplication of Effort.

Enjoy. Digg this article



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  • The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
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    Over 10 comments listed. Printing out index only.
    Re: Outing Patient OS
    by Tim Cook on Saturday December 01, 2007 @ 09:32 PM
    This doesn't happen often. But I have to vehemently disagree with Fred. *The whole ethos of FOSS dictates that developers should work together, sharing improvements of software between them. For this reason forking, or starting a redundant project, is often viewed as an attack against the community.* First of all, the ethos of open source is to let a thousand flowers bloom. I have a HUGE appreciation for your frustration with duplication of effort. I've dealt with those same personal feelings myself since 1999. Remember when you forked FreeMED **AND** OpenEMR? "http://www.linuxmednews.com/1112344633/index_html":http://www.linuxmednews.com/1112344633/index_html Yeah, that was pretty frustrating too. The fact is that people have different needs/wants and desires. I don't know Greg but I did see in a post somewhere that he is doing this because he enjoys it. That is a pretty legitimate reason in my mind. Maybe in a few months he'll change his mind and join another project. I can **PROMISE** you that there are more projects to come. My new one and others based on openEHR specifications. Are you going to roast us on your blog then as well? As a colleague and a friend I would like to ask you to pause and think about it for a bit in order to help get by the frustrations. Regards, Tim
    [ Reply to this ]
    Re: Outing Patient OS
    by Greg Caulton on Saturday December 01, 2007 @ 11:34 PM
    http://www.emrupdate.com/forums/t/11521.aspx
    [ Reply to this ]
    Re: Outing Patient OS
    by Alan Miller on Sunday December 02, 2007 @ 03:48 PM
    I'm going to note here what I noted on your original post: your whole posting could apply just as easily if not more so to ClearHealth/MirrorMed/Resolution. How many Fredux forks of those codebases are going to crop up? I was a little surprised when you started talking about Tolven and PatientOS, because the issue of forking codebases is something I’ve been looking at in the past week or so and I thought you might be talking about the ClearHealth codebase. I’m part of a small IT shop serving medical practices, and it strikes me that the same criticism that you apply to PatientOS could easily be applied to ClearHealth/MirrorMed. The availability of code is nice, but the message that I’ve gotten from reading what’s available is “if you’re a practice, please use our software; if you’re supporting practices feel free to fork our codebase and slap your own name on it.” Sharing code is fine, but over time that strikes me as a recipe to grow lots of slightly-different versions unless someone (with more available time and hopefully more PHP experience than I have) decides to fork the base and open it up wider for development by people outside the current 2-3 companies doing the bulk of the work. So my question is what direction is PatientOS going to move in?
    [ Reply to this ]
    Re: Outing Patient OS
    by lksjt on Tuesday December 04, 2007 @ 12:22 PM
    You're just jealous. PatientOS will be much more maintainable than your crappy PHP code. Take a look at the code that already exists, this guy is doing good work. The maintainability factor will lead to quicker enhancements, and as time goes on it will quickly outpace the PHP products. This duplication of effort will be a good thing in the end, but not for you. And that is freedom!
    [ Reply to this ]
    This looks like a distraction
    by Adrian Midgley on Friday January 25, 2008 @ 03:40 PM
    I don't think we are short of those.
    [ Reply to this ]
    Re: Outing Patient OS
    by Benson Stover on Sunday February 17, 2008 @ 01:03 AM
    Writing good EMR software is hard. There are extremely profitable companies out there that suck really bad at it. In my honest opinion there isn't an Apache of the open healthcare world. In reality most of the open-source EMR's out there suck just as bad if not worse. Your software doesn't even need to be more innovative, just well executed to be well received. The spirit of open-source is about freedom. Freedom to customize, freedom to extend, and freedom to _duplicate_. In the GPL religion the only sin is to take what was given to you and profit from it without paying the tithe of your source code. Something else to keep in mind: Often times opinionated fools talk the loudest.
    [ Reply to this ]
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