Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Solutions for Public Health?
ubiquitin asks: "This week at the CDC's PHIN conference there is a lot of buzz about the possibilities of building out an infrastructure for the public health information network with both closed and open source technologies, especially since the work needs to be solidly secure and is typically done under tight budgets. A handful of states are currently involved and more are getting on board, so it may well be a genuine growth opportunity for Linux/Apache/MySQL-based systems. What would really be helpful are stories about how Open Source systems have been put to use in public health departments, labs, or clinics. Does Slashdot have any such anecdotes to share?"
Full disclosure: I work for a public health company as a developer.
The company I work for gives its source code to its clients, but isn't Open Source. Why? Selling to states or communities, many of these products take dozens of man-years to create. No one state can afford all of the tools that technology can afford, so companies lose money on the first, hoping to gain money on the sale to other states.
That's the ultimate problem in this niche market. Either the states have to provide their own staff (which is problematic, because it's expensive to hire and release employees for government) or they have to pay the true cost of developing the software, rather than spreading the cost out through maintenance and other states.
That said, the company I work for is dependent on the Apache and Jakarta set of projects for our work. Our developers have also contributed code back to open source projects.