A meeting of the medical open source minds will be occurring in Fresno, California this weekend at Dr. Pepper’s (his real name) house. Known as Fresno III after the first two meetings that occurred subsequent to the fall 2001 AMIA Conference, Fresno III will gather together some of the most active participants in the open source medical software revolution. Dr. Pepper of MedMapper fame writes: ‘…if anyone want[s] to come to Fresno and provide input we’d love it. The main development team is Alex Caldwell, Bob Shepard and I (three Family docs, all with 15+yrs experience and computer-programming skills) along with programmer Tim Cook from FreePM. Dr. Nicola Ellis from Britain (PhD in informatics) will join us for this meeting, we’ve had a British and Dutch contingent previously… One of the most intelligent things ever written about medical open source was by Fresno III participant Adrian Midgley on the Fam-Med list:

‘…I’ll say it again…the open source model of software development allows all users to acquire and use the most effective software. This promotes commonality of interface and back end software more than any commercial or governmental scheming can, and also tends to produce good software, maintainable by several support sources, and able to evolve as long as anyone wants it to. Your major risk in any other sort of software is of a forced change of software, or failure of support leaving you languishing. One leads to the other. Think very hard about this…’