Thomas, Just a word of caution on "I don't want to get into arguments about Open Source"... It seems that you are asking for help in testing, debugging, and developing your software but you aren't willing to make this an open source project (at this time). Unfortunately, there is a history (especially in medical software) of people making open source noises but failing to deliver so people may look on your offer with some skepticism. Many people are willing to work on open source software but are understandably reluctant to invest time in a proprietary project. You seem to be offering "partial open source" but this may require a proprietary core engine or other code so it's a non-starter. I think you need to make this decision now and make it clear from the start... are you open source or not? As far as open source business models, there are good business models (and some successful companies) that show that it can be done. IBM and HP earn several billion dollars a year from open source software, as examples. People are happy to pay for services (installation, training, maintenance, customization, etc.).
/Mark --- In openhealth@yahoogroups.com, Thomas Beale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I take your point Will, that's completely fair. In terms of what has > "arrived" so far, we actually have "proper" openEHR systems running now, > full archetyping, templating and so on. Ours (Ocean Informatics) is > being trialled in a number of countries. Functionally it does about 85% > of everything openEHR promises, including templates, supporting > archetype-based queries in a new query language (looks like SQL & Xpath; > this will be published soon), and the other 15% won't be long. > > I would like to know if anyone here is interested in being able to play > with a demonstration system (located in Australia) over a web-service > (published API); currently you would write C# code against a client-side > DLL - the idea is to use the openEHR repository as a proper versioned, > archetyped, semantically queryable back-end. This would be for the > purpose of evaluating openEHR in a hands-on way. I don't want to get > into arguments about open source at the moment - today it is closed > source, but it will become open source as soon as we find an economic > model that pays for what we release before we release it (and in any > case, everything that we learn becomes part of the openEHR > specifications, and eventually the Java project). So the offer is for > people interested in contributing to openEHR / e-Health progress in > general, with all feedback (code if wished) being made public. > > - thomas beale >
