On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 07:16:31PM +1000, David Guest wrote:
> The environment we are working in is thus quite different to the usual
> open source project. There are few people with the cross domain
> knowledge to drive these medical computing projects ("He who codes
> wins") but it is plain to most, that the proprietary model has led
> down a number of dead ends.
>
> It would be nice to find a model that would open the source for
> academics and interested medical practitioners to dabble in code space
> (Jeff's level three participants) while acknowledging that most the
> coding would need to be done by professional developers.
Pay the developers, but release the source afterwards. This just requires
that your developers know that either (a) he who pays owns the copyright, so
that you can licence it openly, or (b) the developers keep the copyright,
but all work product under the contract must be licenced openly.
You might also be interested in the GNOME project's bounty system, where
various desired features have cash values attached to them, to be paid to
the first suitable implementation. I'd actually be interested in Jeff's
thoughts on how well that has worked for GNOME, since he'd know quite a bit
about it, I'd imagine. It doesn't stop you from needing a core team to do
some/most of the development and probably all of the planning, but I do
wonder if it could be a useful way to "share the love", as it were.
> OOo thus offers a model that might be applicable in this area and like
> others I would be interested in the options for outside developers to
> interact on a commercial basis. The power of an open source
> meritocracy may not be directly transferable to this situation but we
> hope that we can at least preserve the principles of code reuse and
> extensibility.
I think that the GNOME bounty scheme, could be one of the best ways of doing
this. Entirely theoretical at this point, though.
- Matt
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
