This article originally appeared August 6, 2000 and is a ‘Best of LinuxMedNews’. It attempts to paint a picture of what a free and open source medical software future would look like and generated a fair amount of discussion. Read it in its entirety here. The amount of activity in open source medical software has stepped up considerably over the last months. Several projects, among them FreePM, GNUmed, Freemed and TK_familypractice are moving forward at a good pace. Many are at the alpha stage, with planned beta’s in 2001. What is all this activity for, one may ask, particularly if new to open source medical software. Where is it all going? What is the problem to be solved? A vision of what is beyond the sunset for open source medical software is in order.