Updated 1/5/2001 Enterprise Linux Today has another report about this. PARIS, FRANCE Minoru Development SARL, CONECTA srl, and Sistema announced today that they have signed a contract with the European Commission’s Fifth Framework Programme to implement an open source approach to accelerate the uptake and improvement of software for regional health care networks. Read the press release here. Read Minoru Development Corp president Brian Bray’s comments below for more details.

The SPIRIT goals are based on four properties of successful open source
projects and seek to build “critical mass” for a sustainable open source
health care software industry.

The four properties of successful projects considered were:

1. A community of dedicated, knowledgable, and interested persons with
   similar goals.

2. A base of software to build upon.
3. A meeting place.
4. Commercial exploitation of the results.
   

The goals are:

1. To increase the size and activity of the open source health care
   community, particularly European participation.

2. To increase the available base of open source software for health
   care by canvasing European health care informatics research projects,
   research organizations, government organizations with in-house publicly
   funded software, and private companies to find new software and
   information resources that can be released in open source form.

3. The “meeting place” will be a specialized server offering services to
   open source health care projects. The services include open source
   dissemination of research results, site hosting, developer tools such as
   CVS, communication tools, mailing lists, groupware applications, and
   audio/video conferencing.

   A key resource is a multilingual (English, French, German, Italian, and
   Spanish) index of available open source software with links to
   evaluations in the health care setting.

   We also expect to provide a lot of background material to help ourselves
   and others convince government policy makers, informatics research
   organizations and health care delivery organizations of the value of the
   open source approach.

4. Open source resources will be disseminated via the Internet and CD
   distribution. Business plans will be created for deploying selected
   resources in European markets on a commercial basis. This means plans
   and consortia for making selected open source products comply with
   national and regional regulations and effectively compete against
   existing market participants and/or create new markets.
   

We thank everyone on the Openhealth list for their enthusiasm and support, without which, this initiative would not be possible. We hope that this project will generate some new tools, opportunities, support, users, and code base that will help all of you reach your goals more quickly and easily.

We need your continued guidance and support to make SPIRIT a success.

We expect to have the web portal fully operational by next summer. We will start with a simple web site within the next few weeks, and then add services based on your requirements.

At the moment, you can help us by pointing us at European groups that we should approach to find additional software and information resources. We are also looking for specific ideas and help to get your projects well presented on the CD.

Both OSHCA[tm] and the Openhealth[tm] list were referenced in our proposal to the Commission. Although the project does not imply European Commission support for the OSHCA principles or for this list, we feel that the results of this project will directly contribute to advancing OSHCA goals and the goals of Openhealth list members.

I invite you to ask questions about the project on the openhealth list.

-Brian