up a level  post article  search  admin  main  parent  thread

Re: Massively Expensive IT Failures in the 90's by Saint on Tuesday August 22, @01:14AM You have good Kung-Fu. However, open software isn't new. Unix has inspired generations of programmers since 1969 in a quasi-open source way. i.e. before it was called open source. The Free Software Foundation was begun in 1984. Open source software has only become a cultural phenomenon relatively recently. Many people forget that the existence of the Internet (and BTW, the software that runs this site) owes a great deal to many unpaid, unsung software engineers working over the years in Universities and other institutions in a quite open source way. Your point about painting everything with the same brush is well taken. The most likely scenario is that clinical computing systems of the near future will be a hybrid of open and commercial software. Having said that, the sins of closed source software in medicine are huge. Had a shared, cooperative method been widespread like the development of Unix we would be in much less of a predicament than we are now: fragmented, lacking in many areas and hugely expensive. Analysis and designs abound, development is precisely the problem in medicine. The great thing about open source is that 'going back to the drawing board' means that someone has already written part of the design. An example is StarOffice 6.0 available as open source in October. These are essential applications that can be embedded into clinical computing platforms. One of many things you can't do that with closed source. On the other hand, I like closed source because it makes open source work harder. -- Saint Post Reply Name Email Notify Notify me via email of responses to this message Title Comment (Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!) Encoding HTML Structured Text Plain Text If none of the above mean anything to you, select 'Plain'! Attachment (You can attach a file to your reply which can then be retrieved by other readers. Try to keep the file sizes below 500Kb in order to conserve network and server resources.) Enter the above code (*Required) Allowed HTML <B> <I> <P> <A> <LI> <OL> <UL> <EM> <BR> <TT> <HR> <STRONG> <BLOCKQUOTE> <DIV .*> <DIV> <P .*> Important Stuff: Note: Fields with bold titles are required. Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads, Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Please do not post offtopic, inflammatory, inappropriate, illegal, or offensive comments. Repeat offenders will be sanctioned.

	www.linuxmednews.com Web
Advertisement: CCHIT certified EMR and Medical Practice Management Software from Medical Software Associates makes patient management easy. Free practice management and medical billing software demo available.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest ©2000-2006 Ignacio Valdes, MD, MS.