Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Government Crafted OSS
matthewg writes "According to the New York Times the federal government has developed an open-source medical records system. It was originally developed for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and doctors started obtaining it under FOIA requests. Some good information on the process of converting it from an internal project to a deployable system exists, and how its open nature has made the system better is available at the WorldVista site." From the article: "Medicare has not estimated what its software giveaway is worth. But Duncan Pringle, chief Vista technologist at Perot Systems, said that each doctor in a practice paid about $20,000 to $25,000 to get started with a commercial system, including costs of software, a license fee charged to each doctor, installation and servicing."
I also hear Microsoft Vista will be Open Source as well ;)
Oh shit, sorry, its not April 1st.
liqbase
Doctors are paying US$20k per head for software installs.
Nice to know in case my current day job comes to an unfortunate end.
How the U.S. Government has been saying "asta la VISTA" to our taxpayer dollars.
Sorry. Had to say it...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Microsoft are like, so gonna sue their asses.
I mean it's incredible, the new windoze name has only been known for half a day, and already evil linux commies are trying to cash in on their intellectual properties.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
OK, here's some flamebait.
An open souce project that provides great value and fills a really important need that is hard to install and maintain.
Where have I heard that before?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
This is not GPL'd, and it is only available to American citizens. It is public domain - zero restrictions if you can legally obtain it. There was a repository named COSMIC up until a few years ago that had copies of all the available codes and a request process. It's been modified at this point IIRC, but the code is still there. Source is not available on all codes, and there are some restrictions if parts of the codes have been developed by a contractor rather than a govt employee (?), and there are export control restrictions on some. But there is a wealth of great code in there that too many people just don't know about.
MUMPS was developed by a MD (patholigist IIRC)
:o)
Well, that makes sense - it certainly is pathological.