A coming wave?

I must say that I’ve become very impressed with the software created by open-source community. Three projects that I’ve recently used come to mind: Firefox/Mozilla, Open Office, and Filezilla. What amazes me is how quickly these projects have evolved into stable, high quality products. In fact, I have used Firefox as my primary browser for well over a year now, in place of Internet Explorer. I’ve started using Open Office and Filezilla more frequently now, and I’ve been very pleased with them both.

I’ve been having this on-going debate with a colleague of mine, Khaled El-Emam, about the actual value of open source products. His argument is that it’s still too soon to jump to go open source because there are still many issues. I’m not a software expert like he is, but my investigations into open source lead me to believe that there is a role for it to play. We already see the impact of things like Apache and Mozilla. Eric Raymond’s book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, provides an excellent documentation of the history and evolution of the field.

So my question is: why don’t we use more Open Source development in health care? I’m sure that if the health care institutions got together and pooled even a fraction of the resources they currently pay for maintenance and licensing, a great project could be launched. I’m told that there is a project called “vista” for the Veterans Administration institutions. I think that I may need to learn more about the project.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “A coming wave?”

  1. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    You might like to visit this site then.
    http://open-source.onestop.net