Medicine And Open Source?

A reader writes: "The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has an editorial on Linux and open source (BMJ 2000;321:976). Also available online." There's been a lot of attention about medical usage of open source software, but not for the typical free reasons, but because when lives are on the line, you want to be able to depend on software not to crash, and open source has a well-deserved reputation for stability.

Comments

Here's a little reality.

[mwalker]

Here's a little bit of reality, try not to chew it too hard.

Linux isn't a real-time operating system. It makes a great real-time controller, but it just doesn't have the granularity to do real time.

As far as embedded medical software goes, there's only one name. And it's not vxworks, the microsoft of real-time embedded, either. That's the stuff that crashed the mars explorer.

ALL medical embedded stuff runs OSE by Enea systems. It comes in three kernel sizes, and it has the best error handling and inter-process communication constructs ever built, from a reliability standpoint. There are OSE systems out there with 10 years of uptime. In addition, OSE can make the interesting claim that it is impossible to crash the OS. This type of reliability is found in a field called "safety-critical systems", and ENEA nearly owns the market. Take a look at the data sheets on their web site.

Here's a great quote: "it is impossible for user processes to corrupt the OSE kernel."

And they're not kidding.

Open Source is a truly wonderful model, but keep in mind that a closed group of true experts can also make great software.