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Advice for an Open Source Development Grant?
IgD asks: "My colleagues and I are developing an open source medical records system. A senior supervisor approached us and let us know a third party is offering a decent amount of money in the form of a grant for any legitimate medical research project. We were all but promised the money if we could come up with a proposal. Has anyone in the Slashdot community received a grant for open source software development? Are there any good examples of such a grant available? How could one measure the results of open source development for publication?"
Refer to other medical research proposals. I'm assuming that you're not trying to get this grant on the sole basis of this being open source, right? The open v/s closed source nature of your project should be pretty irrelevant to your research proposal.
Mmmm.. Donuts
for someone with the time to do so, would be to make a portal with as much info on this subject, and links to sites that may be able to help you get started / funded for such a project. I'm sure the OSS community would appreciate a site with such information. Just a thought...
I've received sponsorship money from some pretty big companies for the development (or augmentation) of an open-source project I wrote.
Now, this wasn't a "here is some money, go write something useful" type of sponsorship, but more along the lines of "we like your work but need a certain feature added. Here is the money, add the feature".
It probably doesn't help you though, since they (the money) came to me...
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
>How could one measure the results of open source >development for publication?"
.. Your reseach being opensource has no impact either positive or negative on the reviewers mind. Keep in mind the goals and make sure the job is well done .. Just because it is open source does not mean the results can be mediocre .. some of the best reseach is open source.
The Same way one measures other research results
If you want to make an open sourced system just for the sake of it being open then you're going to have a hard time. I firmly believe that some things should be open sourced, but it's not always prudent to do so. Every situation is different and open source isn't always the answer. Companies need to make money, even the open source friendly companies release software closed source.
If you can get grant money based on the finished product then open source is a good idea, but if you need to provide a product that will be sold, i think companies will be a little more frugal handing you money to create something open.
I should also have stated that I believe there is a significant need for medical records management software in the open source community and if you were to perform a little market research on medical records software, you would find the field is a mess of competing programs and standards, and you would not believe how much money is made by businesses that have half assed solutions to the problem. The cost to individual medical practices and hospitals is considerable and many companies do not have any real clue of how to properly implement this code. Things are complicated by numerous proprietary databases and lots of new HIPAA legislation that makes interconnectivity a real nightmare.
I've often thought that a good open source team of about thirty individuals including a half dozen subject matter experts, a couple good technical writers and half a dozen programmers could kick some serious butt in this market, establish an inter-operative database standard, either run it platform independent, or take advantage of some pretty powerful, yet inexpensive software like Web Objects and dominate the market within two years. Of course this third party you are talking about is probably interested in such a proposal, thus the offer. It's pretty amazing actually how many folks are wading around aimlessly in this market. Big players like GE, Siemens, IBM etc... are without any direction or focus on this problem and the market payoff could be relatively big if you properly market this to select members of government who are absolutely desperate to reduce the cost of medicine.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
My most successful string of open source solutions involved a small break with an audio-video company. I set up a small Linux network, with a small CRM that was based on, believe it or not, a web based PHP driven "application" that I designed to catalogue my DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, games, books, and comic books. mySQL is the backend, Apache its "OS". I added a few useful modules from popular CRMs that I found on Sourceforge. All of this meant nothing to my client, they were only happy that it fit their every need (they were managing customer data, billing, scheduling, and reports across a series of applications like Excel and Quick Books Pro, and good old pen and paper). Needless to say, not only was my solution extremely scalable and cheap, but it removed the hassle of having to have a file cabinet handy and three or four programs. All they did was click a little link on their KDE panel, and up came Mozilla and their portal to my program.
They quickly refferred me to their lawyer's office, my own dentist, and another small business that specialized in boat repair. I quickly made about $12,000 in my spare time, and not one bit of the software I used cost anything. I have yet to return to any of their sites to fix anything since, and this was over a year ago. The only thing I did was give them each a call when Redhat made RHN available so that they could sign up and have their systems updated for them remotely, for very little $$$. The circle of Linux business life eventually brought money back to Red Hat, whom's OS I used for free as an ISO download, at all of these sites.
You gotta love it.
Come on, they are not very different goals. You can get the job done while having an open source product (and no money). I mean, have you seen the linux kernel? I does get the job done. You could also have the job done and get money while being closed source. You could also have open source and get money, just look at redhat, mysql, etc, etc.. So no, they are nod different goals.
Imho they are very different goals.
Not necessarily. They can get the job done and have open source code. That would probably depend on any stipulations for the grant.
As for the money, I don't know the specifics of their project, but the money could be used to buy computers, equipment, etc. I work for a university based hospital, and have dealt a bit with research proposals, grants, etc. The grants I have dealt with are typically used to pay for things that come up in the course of research, or buys things that the department might not be able to buy on it's own. It might also be used to pay someone's salary, but I'm guessing they're not looking to get rich. As far as who is providing the grant, my guess would be that they want to do a Netscape/Mozilla kind of thing, or they might want make money on installing the systems (service and hardware).
I wish them luck