Finding Medical FOSS: Freshmeat vs. SourceForge

I just realized while searching for new or emerging medical open source projects that freshmeat.net looks and works quite differently compared to former times. Seems they launched already in March 2009 their new Freshmeat 3.0 platform.

Freshmeat.net Now tagging is used for indexing the projects while the categories have been thrown overboard. Regarding medical FOSS the project admins seem not to really make use of this feature. Tags similar to hospital information system, PACS, EMR or patient management have never been used or I was just too dumb to find some health care related ones. Only two projects are tagged with “Medical“, the tag “Medical Science” is associated with 146 projects. One and a half year ago the category “Medical Science Apps” contained 139 projects there.

In contrast at SourceForge.net – that by the way still has the category feature – the Medical Science Apps have grown in the same time from 640 to 907 projects. Beside the much more active community, SourceForge.net is also a pure open source software development platform whereas freshmeat.net is just an software indexing platform where you will also find non-open and commercial software.

So better stick to SourceForge.net when looking for medical FOSS projects, although tagging is a really useful feature … if it would be utilized. Anyway, I just learned that both platforms belong to the same company. @SourceForge Inc.: So why not combine both of your platforms? Looks like they contain already quite similar content …

The ones who doesn’t like digging through hundreds of projects can also take a look at my listing of free open source software for the health care sector that is available at freemedsw.apfelkraut.org. I appreciate as always your comments and additions to it.