>From what I understood I thought WorldVistA was committed to releasing the code publicly without the CCHIT badge. I was right, since Maury just detailed their method for doing this. Still the vast majority of WorldVistA EHR is just FOIA VistA and any "new stuff" will be available separately under the GPL. So "getting the code" I think is hardly the issue.
The larger question is how we, as a FOSS community, will react to the CCHIT and other certifications generally. The only way to do this without violating the GPL is to have a secondary agreement, which limits how the certification is passed around, but respects the GPL freedoms with regards to the code itself. RedHat and many other organizations use trademark in this fashion. But this is not a trademark, and it has entirely different implications. I want to make it clear that I am not advocating anything here except patience. We as a community need to wait to see how WorldVistA handles this. If they handle it badly we can just as easily criticize then as now. Now we hardly have anything concrete to criticize . If they handle it well, they will have provided a prototype mechanism to our community generally for dealing with certifications, and there will be more of those in our future. -FT -- Fred Trotter http://www.fredtrotter.com
