

A letter to Obama - rogercosseboom
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/open_source_letter_to_obama/

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tel
_Ah, yes, open source electronic medical records - a panacea for the health
care industry. Vendors have been pushing this one for years, with little
success, as they don't understand that the inefficiencies in health care keep
a lot of people in work._

And inefficiencies in health records kill a lot of people just the same. But,
you know, vendors don't get the market.

~~~
TheWama
An interesting data point in the electronic medical records discussion.

Those (admittedly few) primary care practices which choose not to interact
with the insurance companies, and operate on a cash basis, also happen to be
the ones who are pushing through higher efficiencies through technology. Hello
Health (<https://www.hellohealth.com/>), in Brooklyn, uses and develops a
medical web platform through its software arm, Myca. Qliance
(<http://qliance.com/>), in Seattle, has been using an electronic records
system from the start, which was described to me as "just a glorified CMS".

It does seem strange that paper is the word of the insurance world, and I
don't know the industry well enough to explain the problem, but it seems the
problem may have something to do with the doctor-insurer dynamic.

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CalmQuiet
What I read between The Register's lines is:

Dear Mr. President: Open Source groups don't advertise in The Register. Let me
tell you who does...

~~~
tptacek
Lame. Dziuba could probably give a fuck about advertisers in The Register.
That he clearly doesn't give a fuck about writing anything but linkbait is the
real critique of this article.

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swombat
" _You can put the best engineering in the world into your product, but if you
don't know how to market, your project will rot in the source repository._ "

Worth pointing out that this applies to commercial software too. If you can't
market your stuff to your target audience, you fail...

~~~
jrockway
I've found that marketing is vastly overrated. I think people think it's
important because Ruby on Rails came out of nowhere and had good marketing,
but that was just a rare special case. Most of the time, people will find your
open source project and start using it _without_ fancy marketing.

An example of this is the Perl OO library, Moose. It started out as some code
factored out of our internal apps. Other people liked it and contributed code.
Now it's the standard way to do OO in Perl. The only marketing that was done
was talking about it on IRC and doing some conference talks. And oh yeah, the
awesome single-page website (<http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/>).

~~~
ja2ke
A good Perl library is going to be found by programmers, because (at least in
my experience) programmers read docs. Especially when searching for good
feature sets.

With software aimed at end users (or businesses, at least business purchases
made outside of IT/dev), you can't expect them to come to you, you have to go
to them... or have fairly amazing word of mouth.

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jgrahamc
The most striking thing about this list of signatories is how none of them
seem like open source leaders. The actual letter is here:
<http://consideropensource.blogspot.com/>

As I read down the list I nodded my head when I came to John Newton of
Alfresco but for the most part my reaction was "Who?" and then I'd look at the
company names and go "Who?" and finally there's Unisys.

~~~
jrockway
You've never heard of Ingres?

But anyway, yeah. It's hard to find time for both coding and writing letters
(that will be ignored) to the President. A classic example here is ESR -- he
spends a lot of time advocating open source, but doesn't spend much time
writing software. (OK, OK, he wrote vc-mode.el and maintains fetchmail. Even
_I_ do more than that!)

The free software movement doesn't need you to write letters. The free
software movement needs you to write excellent free software. The rest follows
naturally.

~~~
jgrahamc
I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. Eric Raymond is close to useless. He
managed to attach himself to the free software movement, rename it and turn it
into being all about him. And he's written almost no software.

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ori_b
Oh. It's by Dziuba. No wonder it reeks of envy and poor writing.

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FraaJad
From the article ... " They have used Microsoft and others in the past, and
they works...". What? Are they even proof reading this thing before hitting
`publish`?

That para onwards, its all old fashioned FUD.

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dreur
Why making a comparison with handicapped people ? ...

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c00p3r
This is well-paid well-written text, nothing more.

The goal of open source is that you can avoid any payments to big-shots like
RH or MS or Sun because of the really huge community. There are no problems
with OSS if you can read and write queries to google search.

It is not about sources, it is about community - free support.

About medical records - it can be easily attached to google's or facebook's
profile. =)

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Ardit20
Open Source means free right. People like free so why should it be any
different for the government. If they can work on linux rather than spending
millions on window software then that's good right loads of money saved for
tax cuts or new jobs or something.

I do not quite get it though why do people spend so much time programming
excellent software to only then give it away for free

