On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 08:50 +0530, Suchi Pande wrote: > ELSIE CASUGAY wrote: > > This whole thing VISTA-OFFICE is entirely unfair not only to the physicians > > but also to vendors. I feel like it is being controlled by some group. This > > VA software is FOIA and supposed to be open source but I have to take a test > > now if I want to support a physician's office. What if I want to help a > > clinic? Does that mean that I am not a qualified vendor? I have 20 years > > experience with VISTA and installed VISTA/CPRS for a private physician in > > 2001 down in Raleigh, NC without any problem and now I have to be tested to > > support it. > > > > Whatever happened to business opportunities? > > It is not clear what licence it is being released under. So it seems > too early to say what is going on. > > As a point of information: > > Open source is usually one of two licence styles. BSD style and GPL style. >
I disagree in principal here, however that is not really germane. But for sure, there are for more styles of licenses than those 2. > The BSD style, which is what public domain comes under, allows a > person to take code and do whatever they like with it: extend it, make > it proprietary, distribute it and not release the source - like > microsoft did with parts of BSD code in their operating systems, at > least in the past. This means that there is a danger of a vendor lock-in. > Not with strong interoperability requirements, but that is neither here nor there. The other thing that BSD code allows you to do that you are missing is it actually allowed greater *developer* freedom. The list of promising open-source projects that have been doomed because of using a license like GPL is long and notable, in fact, many of the well known projects available exist because of this. As well as all of the insanity you get with stuff like readline vs libedit, etc. As far as public domain and BSD style licensing being the same, I disagree, lawyers disagree, the OSI disagrees. I'm not saying you are wrong, because with these legal issues you really can't be wrong, its all a matter of who interprets it and at what time. But the prevailing public opinion on that one does point a different direction. > The GPL style has one basic restriction - a restriction that somewhat > paradoxically *increases* freedom for the user in the longer time > scale. The restriction being that if the user decides to distribute > the program further, the source code must be made available further > too. The consequence of this requirement is that the code can be > developed further by the user, and that you can not ever be locked in > by the vendor. Again, vendor lock-in is not implicitly or explicitly solved via a GPL style license. You can still be locked into a vendor who distributes software under the GPL if no one else distributes functionally equivalent and/or interoperable software. The GPL absolutely does allow for someone else to come along, fork an application and continue a long with it, however, that is a high cost result, and *forcing* a fork by choosing a license does not actually promote any form of interoperability. You have to look no further than the various emacs history pages to see this sort of issue re: emacs, xemacs, etc. As well as this, library lock-in can be just as dangerous. The LGPL exists for a reason, and is very successfully used in many places, and the LGPL allows for commercial software to be built using it, which would for all practical intents and purposes cause this mythical 'vendor lock-in' that you speak of. > > Because of this, a lot of people, including me, regard GPL as the only > sensible code licence in the long term for medical purposes. > I can't say that I am one, I am of the opinion that both licenses have their uses in various situations, including healthcare. Choosing a license could easily be the single most important decision a project ever makes. To cover all possibilities with a all-encompassing statement is not good under any circumstances. > However, one catch is that there is no warranty in GPL licenced code > (essentially because there is no fixed vendor). > There is no warranty in BSD licensed code either. In fact, you would be very hard pressed to find any opensource license with a warranty. That is why every opensource company attempts to make its bread and butter off of support costs. Warranties you pay for, which puts you into a form of vendor lock-in. Look at the current situation with RHEL users. An RHEL user is not able to get support on anything that did not come down from the RHEL package stream. This is a very correct business decision on the part of RedHat. However, does prevent a RHEL user from compiling their own kernel and getting support. The number of RHEL support requests that get closed due to 'unsupported software' is staggering. In addition to this, you end up being forced to use RHEL only in order to actually get support. Support and vendor lock-in are no more tied to licensing than my car is tied to the color of my dogs tail. > It seems to me that the idea behind the certified support release of > VISTA-office is to roll out the system in a supported way, so that > incompetent people do not install it and botch it up. In sue-happy > America, that is something the VISTA-office people and Medicare would > have to worry about. > If VOE is released under nearly any license that it would actually be released on, CMS will never be held liable. Thats what "No Warranty" and "as-is" mean. > I think the way forward for the VISTA-office people is to require an > indemnity from anyone who wants to install it on their own without > support from a certified vendor. > This is implicitly given due to any rational licensing terms. The other key thing to keep in mind is that a piece of software and code released under and "opensource" license is useless. What is useful is a open development model and community driven efforts. Without those, you have a giant hunk of unmaintained code that stagnates and bitrots. It does no one any good other than educational. --Todd ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. 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