Hi Sam and Sebastian!
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 03:45, Sam Heard sam.heard at oceaninformatics.com
wrote:
[...] I was taken by some of the issues that Richard
raised [...] the possibility of people claiming that a particular template was
their design [...] SA seems to offer some protection
for that scenario.
You still have not explained how/why you mean that CC-BY-SA offers
better protection against this than just CC-BY.
Regarding CKM. I sense that you would prefer it was open source
No, I don't have the view that the CKM or anything else used by the
foundation necessarily needs to be open source.
But I do think that openEHR is about open specifications and open
content though, and that it is very important that
work/discussions/experiences produced by the community are openly
accessible so that they can be reused in many environments and that
they can survive tool changes and to avoid vendor lock-in.
We chose to use a closed
source asset management engine from a small company in Australia to get
something working and I believe our team, led by Sebastian, Heather and Ian,
have created something wonderful.
Yes the CKM is an important tooI and it was important to get something
like this up and running quickly, the current CKM is a great
contribution.
I am also aware of some of your (Ocean Informatics') reasons for
basing the CKM on a commercial product and releasing it as a
commercial tool (although available for free to the foundation I
assume), I discussed this with Sebastian and others during and after
MIE2008. I'm not quite sure if your intention was to keep the entire
solution as closed source or if you just wanted/needed to protect the
calls made to the underlying commercial package. (Is it
http://www.arcitecta.com/mediaflux/ ?) Anyway, the reasons may be any,
the most important thing is not in this case the software licence, but
the open availability of the clinical content, discussions, reviews
etc.
(A drawback with the current situation though is that it's hard for
others than Ocean Informatics employees to contribute with
code/feature improvements or plugins to the de facto standard
archetype management tool (CKM) used by and promoted by the
foundation. The fact that such contributions would go in to a closed
commercial product also makes such contributions less likely.)
It might be that there will be open source
tools that do this job in the future but I suspect these will flourish in
the commercial sector for the time being
If the CKM content is openly available and the data formats are open,
then there is a chance that open source products (or other competing
closed source products) can be used in the future. If not, then we
actually have a vendor lock in. The same goes for all other software
packages used by the openEHR foundation, the wiki, version management,
issue tracker, specification editing tools etc. As long as there is a
working, well documented way out that allows the community
contributions to be exported without too much hassle, then I believe
most people will accept the use of closed source solutions in a
setting like openEHRs.
This is also a risk management issue, a company behind a closed source
product can disappear, run out of resources or simply discontinue
support for a product. If I was heading a national program (or an
international foundation) considering to use the CKM for important
work, then I'd make sure that I either had possibilities and rights to
modify to the source code via some agreement, or that there were well
documented complete export facilities (and I'd set up a routine to
backup the exports) before investing too much time/resources in
CKM-based work.
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 08:34, Sebastian Garde
sebastian.garde at oceaninformatics.com wrote:
The web service interface of CKM is described here:
http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/healthmod/CKM+Webservices
This is a great start, thanks for documenting and announcing it!
If you are missing something let me know or raise a Jira issue in CKM:
About/Suggest new feature (when logged in).
1. I assume that developer resources are limited and that it would be
wiser to spend time on improving CKM features than to make the perfect
machine-to-machine interface for every possible content item in the
CKM. Thus in order to quickly get the complete export/backup feature
discussed above, then maybe a documented, machine readable complete
daily CKM database dump in the form of files on a public webserver
will probably do the job. (I guess excluding the stored user password
hashes might be wise for security reasons though :-) at least until
you start using openID and can avoid storing passwords at all...)
2a. Why is reading of the archetype discussions and reviews hidden to
people not logged in? When e.g. the discussion thread Generic name of
medication recently moved from the mailing-list to the CKM, then at
the same time it moved from public space to private space, the
continued discussion is
