Category Archives: Open Source

Bundestagswahl: Die Standpunkte der Parteien zu Freier Software

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FSFE Wer zur Bundestagswahl noch unentschlossen ist und bei der Wahl auch die Position der Parteien und deren Kandidaten zu Freier Software berücksichtigen möchte, kann hier fündig werden. Auf Initiative der Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) wurden die Kandidaten zu Ihrem Standpunkt im Hinblick auf den Einsatz und der Unterstützung freier Software befragt. Des weiteren wurden von der FSFE die einzelnen Parteiprogramme diesbezüglich analysiert und zusammengefasst.

Nur bei Bündnis 90/Die Grünen sind freie Software, offene Standards und freie Lizenzen fester Bestandteil des Parteiprogrammes.

Verwunderlich ist es schon ein bisschen, dass gerade bei den Piraten – einer Partei, die dem digitalen Raum entstammt und sich auch nur exklusiv mit diesem beschäftigt – nicht besonders viel zu freier Software gesagt wird. Eigentlich alle ihre Ziele habe irgendwo etwas mit freier Software zu tun bzw. sind nur mit solcher zu erreichen … deshalb sollte sie eigentlich einen zentralen Punkt im Parteiprogramm einnehmen. Aber die Piraten sind eben auch nur eine “Klientel-/Themenpartei” und nicht mehr …

Finding Medical FOSS: Freshmeat vs. SourceForge

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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.

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The Stimulus Bill and Its Impact on FOSS

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WSM: Code Red

Phillip Longman recently wrote an interesting article for the Washington Monthly about Obama’s Stimulus Bill and its impact to the implementation of FOSS in the American health care system.

Titled “Code Red – How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform” he gives introductorily a short overview about the drawbacks of the current health care system and the idea behind Obama’s Stimulous Bill aka American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

He subsequently provides detailed insights about Electronic Medical Record (EMR) implementations across the U.S. in which the adoption of FOSS has considerably increased the quality of care and reduced costs in contrast to proprietary EMR solutions.

His actual point is that the bill and the thereby provided money (about $ 20 billion) is about to be restricted only to proprietary EMR software companies in case their lobbying succeeds.

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Barriers to FOSS Adoption in Quebec and elsewhere?

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Quebec

G. Paré et al. published in Februar 2009 an insightful article about the “Barriers to Open Source Software Adoption in Quebec’s Health Care Organizations” (PDF) in the Journal of Medical Systems. Their abstract reads like this:

“We conducted in-depth interviews with 15 CIOs to identify the principal impediments to adoption of open source software in the Quebec health sector. We found that key factors for not adopting an open source solution were closely linked to the orientations of ministry level policy makers and a seeming lack of information on the part of operational level IT managers concerning commercially oriented open source providers. We use the case of recent changes in the structure of Quebec’s health care organizations and a change in the commercial policies of a key vendor to illustrate our conclusions regarding barriers to adoption of open source products.”

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HowTo find alternatives to software XY

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Are you looking for an alternative to your up to now favorite computer program XY?

The Web site AlternativeTo – “Find better Windows, Mac, Linux and online applications” could be a reasonable source for conveniently answering such question. At alternativeto.net you can search for the application that you want to replace. As result you will get a list of alternative software with similar (or even better) functionality. This list can then be filtered by tag, license (Open Source!) and supported platform.

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Veranstaltungshinweis: Aktionstag gegen Software- und Bio-Patente

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Auszug aus der Presseerklärung des FFII: “Angesichts der ausufernden Patentierungspraxis des Europäischen Patentamts (EPA) rufen Patentkritiker zu einer Demonstration gegen Bio- und Softwarepatente am 15. April in München auf. Bei der Kundgebung auf dem Marienplatz wird neben anderen Richard M. Stallman, Gründer und Präsident der Free Software Foundation (FSF) sprechen.”

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FOSS Tea Time

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Isn’t it nice to have mascots? All the FOSS folks united for coffee.

oss_tea_time

From left to right: Beastie, Tux, Duke and Mozilla.

On the wall: Richard M. Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, GNU and Evolution.

On the shelf: Perl and Puffy (OpenBSD).

On the table: Apache, GIMP, Open Office, X.org, GTK+ and GNOME.

[found via heise.de, the original image is probably from freebsdos.com or flickr.com]

Freemedsw – Most popular projects

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Doctor Tux

As freemedsw.apfelkraut.org is now online for more than a year (anniversary 2008/01/12), it is time for a first ranking of the most popular Open Source projects for the health care sector.

Meanwhile 115 active projects are listed and I still (!) appreciate your help in case you find a broken link, incorrect information or you just have improvement suggestions. Please send me a message or leave a comment at this post. You can submit change requests or new projects via a form which is available here.

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Some numbers about FOSS in health care

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Adoption of FOSS in health care seems to be spreading more and more. Still it is hard to catch sight of some concrete numbers, giving a detailed insight into the actual utilization of FOSS applications in health care.

On the 4th of December the AMIA Open Source Working Group (OS-WG) has released a white paper examining the benefits of FOSS in health care. It is titled “Free and Open Source Software in Healthcare 1.0” and freely available for download. The main author is Ignacio Valdes (chairman of the AMIA OS-WG) who is also the admin of LinuxMedNews.

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