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This list was last updated on March 28, 2003.
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Health Care Specific Projects
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jEngine
Description: The purpose of the project is to build a world class open source Enterprise integration engine. Uses of JEngine include healthcare systems/hospitals HL7 interface engine, intergration of HL7 with EMR and Practice Management Systems.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last update: 19 September 2002 Ver: 1.0.1 
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Medal – The Medical Algorithms Project
http://www.medal.org/index.html
A Medical Algorithm is any computation, formula, survey, or look-up table, useful in healthcare. We have collected over 3500 algorithms spanning major medical domains, organized into 44 chapters. An additional chapter contains algorithms contributed by our visitors. To ensure the widest possible audience, the algorithms have been implemented in an Excel workbook which you can freely download to run on your Windows or Macintosh computer.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last update: 19 September 2002 Ver: 9.6
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3D Slicer
http://www.slicer.org/
The 3D Slicer is freely available, open-source software for visualization, registration, segmentation, and quantification of medical data.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last update: 18 September 2002 Ver: 1.3.0
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Care2002
http://care2x.com/
CARE 2002 is a smart software for hospitals and health care organizations. It is designed to integrate the different information systems existing in these organizations into one single efficient system. CARE 2002 solves the problems inherent in a network of multiple programs that are noncompatible with each other. It can integrate almost any type of services, systems, departments, clinic,processes, data, communication, etc. that exist in a hospital.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last update: 18 September 2002 Ver: 1.0.02
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Smartie (MedNotes)
http://www.smartie-ist.org/
Integration of tools and critical knowledge in the clinical field for medical expert decision. Strong user involvement, knowledge extracted from Evidence-Based sources and validated by EU experts. The project aims at collecting medical digital assistants running stand alone in web browsers and palmtops tested in real world situations and licensed under open source initiative.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last update: 3 September 2002
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Reminder Database
http://www.crmef.org/reminder.html
The program’s main menu page features graphs showing practice quality parameters. Among others, these include pie charts showing glycohemoglobin results among all practice diabetics, and bar charts showing the number of women overdue for followup of various pap smear problems. The program may also show performance by individual physicians. The graphs on the main menu are designed to be key motivators to recall patients and produce good outcomes.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last update: 2 September 2002 Ver: 23Apr2002
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PICNIC
http://picnic.euspirit.org/
PICNIC will develop the next generation regional health care networks to support new ways of providing health and social care. The aim is to prepare regional health care providers to implement the next generation, secure, user-friendly, health care networks and to make the European market for telematics health care services less fragmented. The partners in PICNIC have agreed to make the development in an Open Environment: 1. An architecture, which is open and interoperable. 2. All models and specifications are in the public domain. 3. Applications, interfaces and messages are implemented according to the Open Source Model.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 2 September 2002
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Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)
http://www.healcentral.org/index.htm
Digital multimedia, such as images and videos, are playing an increasingly important role in health sciences education. Educators, however, often do not have the time or resources to create high-quality materials. In the Fall of 2000 the development of Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) was started with funding of the National Science Foundation and in collaboration with National Library of Medicine.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 21 August 2002 Ver: Beta 1
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myPACS
http://sol.cc.u-szeged.hu/~kszabo/myPACS.html
myPACS is a web-based medical image management system. It allows uploading images and patient data from a web-browser. Images can be viewed in two different size of thumbnails. It doesn’t support the DICOM standard, but it can be useful where images are accessible in ordinary image file formats such as JPG (for example digitized by a scanner or a frame grabber or downloaded from the Net).
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 13 August 2002
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MedicalWords
http://medicalwords.sourceforge.net/
The purpose of this project is to create Public Domain Medical Terminology documents that could be easily used by applications.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 August 2002
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CRISNET
http://www.crisnet.be
CRISNET is a Primary Care research organisation dedicated to medical information exchange and gathering through web based secure Open Source technology. CRISNET is currently developing a web based interface between Primary and Secondary care.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 August 2002
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KPumpe
http://kpumpe.sourceforge.net/
KPumpe is a diabetes diary application with support for reading records from your glucometer. It supports the Onetouch Ultra and other glucometers where glucomodule plugins are available.
- dscott @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 8 July 2002 Ver: 0.1
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OpenEMR
http://www.synitech.com
OpenEMR is a modular, HIPAA compliant, Open Source, cross-platform Electronic Medical Records system (EMRS) developed by Synitech Incorporated (www.synitech.com). It facilitates efficient office management through automated patient record journaling, and has been successfully integrated with third-party technologies including speech recognition, secure wireless access, touch screen portables, and biometric authentication. Interface screens are themable and optimized for consistency, simplicity, speed of access to patient information, and minimum eye strain. OpenEMR is based upon widely-used public standards to achieve maximum compatibility with evolving technologies.
- stack @ synitech.com
Last Update: 8 July 2002 Ver: 1.3
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U.S. Food and Drug Administration National Drug Code Directory
http://www.fda.gov/cder/ndc/index.htm
The NDC System was originally established as an essential part of an out-of-hospital drug reimbursement program under Medicare. The NDC serves as a universal product identifier for human drugs. The current edition of the National Drug Code Directory is limited to prescription drugs and a few selected OTC products. The data is updated quarterly within 5 working days after the end of March, June, September, and December.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 3 July 2002
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e-TALC Electronic Teaching-aids At Low Cost
http://www.e-talc.org/
e-TALC is a collaborative project to freely distribute up-to-date health and development information on CD-ROM.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 July 2002
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DOSIS/GP
http://www.imagineers.nl/DOSIS/
DOSIS/GP is an acronym for Dutch Open Source Information Systems for use by General Practitioners. It is part of the OpenKaart initiative.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 22 May 2002
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Datasus CCS-SIS components
http://www.datasus.gov.br/ccssis/
The CCS-SIS consortium is developing software components based on OMG HDTF (CorbaMed) standards for health care. These components are being made available under the GPL.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 13 May 2002
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MedSource
http://www.medsource.com/index.html
MedSource is an evolving resource to support the smart implementation of Open Source software in health care. Our quest is to support solutions and sharing that significantly lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Web-enabled and other software platforms, applications, interfaces and software components for the health care industry.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 11 April 2002
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HAPI
http://hl7api.sourceforge.net/
HAPI (HL7 application programming interface) is an open-source, object-oriented HL7 parser. The main distinguishing feature of HAPI is that it uses specific Java classes to represent each HL7 message structure. This allows it to enforce the structural validity of your messages when you compile your code, and to enforce the validity of field data at run time, with Java Exceptions. Source code for messages is generated automatically from HL7’s database of standard messages.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 3 April 2002 Ver: 0.2
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iPath – Telemedicine Framework
http://ipath.sourceforge.net
iPath is an open source framework for building telepathology/telemedicine applications. At the core is the open source iPath-Server, an extsible telemedicine database sever with a web based interface. The iPath Server provides something like a medical discussion forum, where cases can be easily presented to others, discussed and commented within dedicated user groups. Besides a case database, iPath also provides additional modules. E.g. with the remote microscopy module you can remote control a motorised microscope over internet (currently iPath supports Leica Mikcroscopes and will soon be adapted to Merzhaeuser stage controller) As iPath is a very flexible system there are many different possibilities of using it. * Discuss difficult cases within dedicated user groups. * Collect different information of one cases from different sources. * Conenct your microscope to the Internet and share it with others. * Provide feedback to senders of specimen by presenting them images of i
- kurt.brauchli @ unibas.ch
Last Update: 1 March 2002 Ver: 0.4.0
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OdontoLinux
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odontolinux/
Dental management software written in PHP4 and PostgreSQL.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 18 February 2002 Ver: 0.6.1
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OSCAR
http://oscar-cmc.org
OSCAR is a web based family practice system supporting the needs of care delivery, teaching, and research. OSCAR is based on more than 10 years of experience with the MUFFIN practice management system. OSCAR includes evidence based decision support tools for family practice.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 4 February 2002
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OpenKaart
http://www.openkaart.org
Our aim is an open API on the basis of a open source kernel (kernHIS/kernXIS) system, primarily for General Practice systems but hopefully also for aother information systems in Medical care. In the near future the website we also be in English.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 3 February 2002
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Debian-med
http://auric.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/
The goal of Debian-Med is a complete system for all tasks in medical care which is build completely on free software. The base of the project is the Debian distribution of GNU/Linux. Debian-med is a subset of that distribution specialised for medical applications. As a byproduct, the project is expected to integrate many existing projects by installing them in the same distribution. Open source health care products included in Debian-med will also be distributed in the full Debian GNU/Linux system.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 February 2002
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Res Medicinae – Information in Medicine
http://www.resmedicinae.org
Res Medicinae is supposed to be a comprising software solution for use in Medicine which combines intuitive ease of use with the advantages of the Java platform. It uses latest technology adhering to common standards for medical software and will such be open to many other medical systems. Res Medicinae is the attempt to overcome high pricing in the realm of Medical Information Systems and to provide users with a free, stable, secure, platform-independent, extensive system. Res Medicinae is and will be free in every meaning. Its contributors enjoy working together communicating over mailing lists and are encouraged by the idea of sharing their knowledge with those people living on “the poorer side of” the world.
- christian.heller @ tuxtax.de
Last Update: 14 January 2002 Ver: 0.0.1.0
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PIANO
http://mbi.dkfz-heidelberg.de/mbi/software/
Piano is a library containing ~75 algorithms and tools for multi-dimensional medical image processing, analysis and visualization. It is used in our group for several projects in the field of surgical planning.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last update: 4 January 2002 Ver: 0.6.0
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JALLOO
http://mbi.dkfz-heidelberg.de/mbi/software/
Jalloo offers a CORBA interface to the PIANO image processing library. Thus it enables a simple programming model to distributed image processing.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 24 December 2001 Ver: 0.1
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dcm4che
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dcm4che/
dcm4che is an implementation of DICOM in Java.The sample applications may be useful on its own.It also includes an IHE compliant Image Archive application,based on J2EE.
- gunter.zeilinger @ tiani.com
Last Update: 15 December 2001 Ver: 0.9.8
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SQL Clinic
http://www.sqlclinic.net
Description: A web interface to postgres written in perl. This is a complete clinical and administrative application for providers of psychiatric housing, although the software is designed to accomodate an entire Community Mental Health Care Center (CMHC) or private practitioners (both Clinical Social Workers and Psychiatrists) working in Behavioural Health. The source is available under the terms of the GPL. Technical support is free via mailing lists. Support contracts are available from Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers of New York.
- spargel_boy @ yahoo.de
Last Update: 7 December 2001 Ver: 1.0.0-beta
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jTerm
http://www.jterm.org/
jTerm is an open source terminology server written in 100% Java. jTerm includes: a core set of java classes implementing the deKeiser Uniform Representation Formalism for terminological systems, and raw data loaders for SNOMED-RT 1.x.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 13 November 2001 Ver: 3.3
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FreeMED
http://www.freemedsoftware.org/
This is a project to build a web based open source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and physician practice management system.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 15 October 2001 Ver: 0.2.1.3
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Pathology Abbreviations and Acronyms
http://www.pathinfo.com/abbtwo.htm
Pathologists use lots of abbreviations and acronyms. An acronym is an abbreviation of a phrase, where each letter of the acronym is added consecutively from the first letter of each of the words of the phrase. An abbreviation is a shortened form of a text-string, and all acronyms are types of abbreviations. The page contains a computer parsable list of over 12,000 abbreviations used in medicine and pathology.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 13 October 2001 Ver: May18 2001
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ApothecaryRx
http://www.psnw.com/~alcald/apothecary.html
ApothecaryRx is a drug database for looking up information on medications used in primary care. You can look up a drug by certain matching criteria such as trade name, generic name, therapeutic class, or by names of drugs with which it may interact. Plans are to expand it so you can enter a list of drug names and have the program run a check for interactions against the entire list.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001
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DocScope – Physician Friendly Medical Records
http://openhealth.com/docscope/
DocScope will be a free medical information tool that is as natural and easy for physicians to use as the spreadsheet is for accountants. Health care standards and open source application development tools are both converging on XML technology for the representation of records, transactions, and messages. This creates a new opportunity to assemble health care record systems from readily available open source XML components.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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Presurgical
http://sourceforge.net/projects/presurgical/
Pre-Surgical Patient Questionnaire
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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DukeLists
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dukelists/
Duke Standard Anesthesia Lists and Codes
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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LinStanPump
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linstanpump/
Linstanpunmp is a linux port of the dos program STANPUMP. This program is used to drive a computer controlled infusion pump using a pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: 0.2
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LAMDI – Linux Anesthesia Modular Devices Interface
http://gasnet.med.yale.edu/lamdi/
The basic idea behind the LAMDI project is to develop a modular interface between various Anesthesia devices. Devices in this context could be: data capture devices, Software interpretation devices like pharmacokinetic or hemodynamic modelling modules; Control devices like infusion pumps and simulation devices.
- dscott @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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Harp – Harmonisation for the secuRity of web technologies and aPplications
http://www.ist-harp.org/
The objectives of this project are development and demonstration of tools for the harmonisation of applied and emerging Web oriented security systems in telemedicine. The early deliverables contain an investigation of security requirements for medical systems across Europe.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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Ovnibase
http://ovnibus.free.fr/
Ovnibase is a system to collect databases of patient data for clinical and research (evidence based medicine) purposes. The components are “Sane” for scanning input forms, PostgresQL for the database and apache/netscape for a browser interface.
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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Medical Record DTD
http://sourceforge.net/projects/medrec/
The goal is to develop XML DTDs and software to facilitate the secure transfer of personal health record information from notebooks, PDAs, and other local databases to websites that specialize in archiving health record information.
- dalmolin @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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Gnosis (formerly GLIMS)
http://glims.sourceforge.net/
Gnosis is planned to be an open source, OS independant Laboratory Information Management System. The target market is small through huge laboratories in need of a powerful, simple to use and infinitely configurable LIMS.
- dalmolin @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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XChart
http://www.openhealth.org/XChart/
The Open Healthcare Group’s XChart Project is a movement to create an electronic medical record that is easier than paper. XChart is a system designed to combine the ease, speed and portability of paper systems with the efficiencies of computerized records. XChart is browsable via the web with minimal training. XChart supports standards.
- dalmolin @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: 20010420
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Open PM ToolWorks
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openpmtoolworks
This project is dedicated to developing medical group practice management calculators and tools that would be of interest to medical practice administrators.
- dalmolin @ openhealth.com
Last Update: 1 October 2001 Ver: No source
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http://sourceforge.net/projects/dukelists/ Duke Standard Anesthesia Lists and Codes
- brianbr @ openhealth.com
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Minoru is now recruiting
Come and join us in exciting opportunities in health care informatics.
Welcome Sylvain!
We are pleased to announce that Mr. Sylvain Hellegouarch has joined the Minoru team as a software developer. Sylvain will be a valuable part of the group helping to move open source in health care forward.
Positions available:
Accountant/Book-keeper Minoru is currently seeking a part-time accountant/book-keeper. Knowledge of French and European accounting practices, and good knowledge of French and English will ensure your success.
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Brian Bray, President
Brian has extensive experience in management consulting and software product development. Highlights of his career include:
* As a development manager at Microsoft was instrumental in shipping 19 Microsoft products including several versions of Microsoft Mail.
* Principal architect of a major electronic medical record system now being deployed at hospitals worldwide.
* Numerous consulting assignments with start-up companies and public organizations to evaluate new markets, product ideas, technologies and development teams.
Dave Scott, Administration & Communications
Dave has a long history successfully developing and deploying advanced technology in large corporate environments. His strength is the communication of technical concepts leading to the smooth adoption of new technology.
Dave’s experience includes:
* design and implementation of a 2000-user e-mail facility
* develop a network monitoring system to warn of network congestion and interruptions on a national DECnet network
* write online help systems, technical documentation, user education material, and teach end users in a classroom setting
Sylvain Hellegouarch, Software Engineer
Sylvain holds a masters degree in computer science and has worked on several open source projects, including an MP3 audio player.
Recently having completed his education, he would like to advance the open source software base, and works at Minoru as a software engineer.
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Educational Services and Seminars
The Openhealth[tm] Open Source Briefing Seminar
The Openhealth[tm] Open Source Briefing Seminar is a 1/2 day introduction for executives and senior management on the strategic value of the open source business model and software applications.
This seminar provides background information on open source in health care and presents a vision of how open source will transform the marketplace for health care software. Your organization will receive recommendations for practical steps to seize the opportunities that this powerful paradigm provides.
The cost of the seminar is 1 000 Euro plus travel expenses to your location. Seminars are available in English or French.
Who should attend?
* National health care informatics policy organizations
* Regional health care management
* Hospital administration
* Vendors of health care systems
* Laboratories
* Pharmaceutical manufacturers
* Primary care providers
* Long term and home care providers
Clients who have benefited from this seminar include:
* the National Health Service (NHS) Information Authority Executive of the United Kingdom.
* the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, International Atomic Energy Agency Joing Programme
* Health Canada, Office of the Health Information Highway
* MDS Labs
A Special Offer for Clients in the European Union
If you are located in the European Union and are involved in national policy for health care informatics, you may qualify for partial funding by the European Commission to cover the costs of the seminar. Contact us for more information.
Health care applications
Openhealth DocScope
Openhealth DocScope will be a free medical information tool that is as natural and easy for physicians to use as the spreadsheet is for accountants.
The tool will enable physicians to:
* view standard medical records
* create custom views of the information to match personal needs
* structure and organize this information
* include rich text and multimedia components into the medical record
* create personal forms, templates, and boilerplate text for data entry
* sequence data entry, analysis, and viewing actions
* add customized behaviour through high-level scripts
* extend the classes of information stored
* integrate the record with data sources and software agents
* securely access the information anywhere, anytime, including mobile devices
This is a new project seeking development partners and support.
Openhealth Circare
Openhealth Circare is a client and provider index that ties together the information about a single patient and makes it available securely to care providers in a distributed network.
The goal of this project is to be the “home page” for finding patient information distributed in numerous locations around a regional network.
Openhealth Circare includes independently reusable components as part of its distribution:
* Web Corbascript.
* A non-validating XML processor in C++.
* An XML style sheet processor of a subset of XSL.
* A CorbaMed PIDS server.
* An authentication service for time based web logins.
This is a partially completed project seeking new partners to complete its development.
Openhealth SmartenRx
Openhealth SmartenRx is a pharmacy communication system. It sends messages between pharmacists and physicians containing medication profiles, recommendations, and new prescriptions. The system also supports research use of historical data to measure effectiveness. The system was developed as part of a research project evaluating the effectiveness of changing care provider roles based on new possibilities enabled by regional health networks.
Technical components
BW (Basic Windows)
BW (Basic Windows) is an application framework used by many of the other programs hosted here. BW defines the virtual world that the Minoru application code executes in. The framework provides an interface to the operating system platform and is small enough to ease porting efforts to new platforms in the future.
Docgen
Docgen is a utility that extracts specially formatted comments from source code to make html documentation files. It uses the BW framework.
SQL/CLI kit
SQL/CLI (Structured Query Language / Call Level Interface) is an ISO and IEC standard for database access. The most widely known implementation of SQL/CLI is Microsoft’s ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) product. This package is an aggregation of other open source projects into a single kit with a driver manager and two drivers for the PostgresQL database.
This kit has been superceded by the UnixODBC package now widely available. Other Minoru packages that depended on this kit have been upgraded to work with UnixODBC.
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With the rapid growth of Linux as a production operating system, news articles in Forbes, and announcements of Corel, Netscape and IBM, a lot of interest has been generated in “open source” this year. What is all the excitement about? Is this just another computer industry fad or buzzword? Isn’t open source just for students, Microsoft haters, and amateur computer enthusiasts?
Minoru has embraced open source because it’s the best means to achieve our corporate objectives.
The change from proprietary software to open source software will be as significant as the change from mainframe technology to personal computers.
Every company in the computer industry will be affected by open source. Some will win during this change and others will lose. Such shifts generate massive waves of innovation in the industry and drive it forward to new heights of excellence. This shift will affect both home and business computing and change the way the world works.
What is open source?
At its base, open source software is software that comes with the source code in a form that customers can modify for their own needs and resell or give away to others under the same terms.
Software in the Public Interest has registered the phrase “open source” as a certification mark and www.opensource.org contains a detailed definition of what open source means. Other groups have trade-marked similar terms. A number of industry standard software licenses are consistent with the general meaning of open source.
This definition and the licenses that conform would be little more than a footnote in the history of computing if not for the growing success of substantial and useful open source projects.
This success is initially baffling on two fronts:
* Traditional software development methods say that the way these projects were developed can not result in something reliable and well suited to customer needs. They are.
* A simplistic view of economics would say that individual developers and Fortune 500 companies would not spend considerable effort producing products in lucrative markets and then license them so that they can be given away or resold by others without compensation. They are.
Clearly there is more happening here than meets the eye.
Open source software is customer constructed software.
Users of the software fund its development directly by either working on the software themselves or contracting someone to do it. This is the key to its success and why it is revolutionizing the software industry.
The Internet is the enabling technology for open source
Traditional software development methods are based on a central authority that priorizes features and allocates limited resources to create a product. Technical and feature decisions are centralized.
The open model for developing software uses the Internet to assemble and coordinate unbounded teams of developers and test users. Feature decisions are decentralized and made by writing code and evaluating the results. If a new feature is needed by someone, they are free to expand the development team.
Larger open source projects have more individuals actively testing experimental builds than the test departments of the largest software vendors.
For more information on the processes of open source projects, see Eric Raymond’s seminal paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
The pricing model for the original package software business for PC’s was to sell the product and “give away” support. Today, software vendors get revenue from a mix of product and support sales. The Internet enables software producers to give away high volumes of software at extremely low cost. When a user downloads software on the Internet, they are paying virtually all of the costs of distribution directly. The open source pricing model is to “give away” the software and sell support and other services.
What does open source software cost?
Whatever you want to pay.
If the customer decides to download source code, customize it for their own needs, compile and test their own binary on each platform of interest, install it on each machine, print their own manuals and provide their own user training and support, then open source software is “free”.
Technical individuals using the software for their own use, either don’t need these things or can easily do it themselves.
Small companies and non-technical users need convenience and some support. Open source software is also sold in traditional packages with paper manuals, CD-ROMs and telephone support for prices generally cheaper than competitive proprietary software.
Large corporations need all of these services and can chose to do them in house or by contract. Since the source is open, they have a broad choice of contractors and resellers to chose from and complete flexibility to change anything to meet their most exacting needs. The freedom from per machine, per user, and per connection licensing costs enables rapid deployment and flexible reconfiguration without budget surprises.
What are the benefits of open source?
1. Lower software costs
2. More flexibility
3. More reliable products
4. Better standardization and long term stability
5. Not reliant on a single vendor
6. Faster pace of innovation
7. New projects can build on the existing base of open source code
8. Data is not “hidden away” in proprietary formats
9. Peer review increases security for systems exposed to public networks
What are the risks of open source?
Most open source projects will fail.
Open source methods, like all software development methods, do not guarantee success. The key technical factors for success are the skills and dedication of the core developers and interface designers on the project. Open source projects can also fail for market reasons if they do not produce results faster than competitive projects.
Although no statistics are available, the failure rate for new open source projects is probably similar to the failure rate for new proprietary development projects.
Canceled open source projects leave a legacy of source code and ideas that can be merged into more successful efforts or recycled into other projects.
Open source projects are not deadline driven.
With an open ended development team, it is impossible to reliably predict release dates. This is not a problem when deploying finished works, but can be a problem if customers become dependent on anticipated future events. Customers can manage this risk by active participation in the open source project concerned.
There are some application areas where the economics don’t make sense.
Where the number of users is small and they are in strong competition, the value of contributing to an open source project is less clear.
Open source software is not as well established as proprietary software.
Open source software has been available and growing in scope for decades, but there are still many application areas where open source solutions are not yet available in final form. There are an extremely large number of active projects working to close this gap.
Open source software is also unfamiliar to many potential users. Individuals and corporations with UNIX experience have a wide range of open source products that are familiar and available. Users habituated to other platforms have fewer open source products available without changing operating systems and face more of a learning curve.
In the past, the press and market research organizations have not evaluated open source alternatives to proprietary software. Background information on open source software is only now being written.
Open source software is unproven for non-technical applications.
Not surprisingly, the first successes of open source source software have been in areas where the users and developers are one and the same. The origins of open source have been developers with unmet problems, needs or desires who then wrote code for their own use, often in their spare time, and shared the results with other developers.
Open source is now expanding into new areas and producing products for non-technical users, but this work is in its infancy.
Why now?
Three reasons:
* the Internet,
* Linux, and
* changes in proprietary software pricing.
The Internet is a key enabler for the development and distribution of open source software. The rapid expansion of the Internet into business and the home has extended the reach of open source and more widely publicized its benefits.
Open source products have been available for years and used extensively in the UNIX world. The creation of open source operating systems such as Linux and others, have “completed the circle” enabling complete systems and networks to be deployed entirely with open source software. The popularity of Linux has generated new revenue for open source vendors that is now being used to expand development efforts.
Early microcomputer software was sold for a fixed price that included telephone support and sometimes bug fixes and updates. As microprocessors have penetrated the corporate market, pricing has moved more towards the older negotiated price agreements for products and services used in minicomputer and mainframe software. The unbundling of support from products makes the open source business model more attractive to vendors and more familiar to customers.
What are the successes of open source?
* Linux is the only operating system other than the Microsoft Windows family with a growing market share. According to press reports quoting IDC and Datapro studies, Linux is now used by more than 14% of businesses and it’s market share is expected to overtake the Mac OS before 2001.
* Netscape Navigator is now an open source product. Netscape has seen the advantages of open source.
* Apache is the number one web server in use. Apache development is partially supported by IBM.
* The Internet is founded on the use of open source software to define and refine it’s protocols.
* GNU compilers and other development tools are now the standard tools on many platforms.
* FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are the foundation of many ISP businesses and major web services such as Yahoo.
* The Perl language is the basis for much of the active content on web pages. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. supports work on perl.
Can I trust my business to open source software?
If you do business on the Internet, you already do.
Key infrastructure of the Internet, such as domain name lookup and e-mail forwarding is done largely with open source software. Many Internet service providers and some of the most active sites on the web are hosted on open source operating systems.
Bob Young, president of RedHat software, has compared buying proprietary software to buying a car with the hood welded shut. Peer reviews and widespread testing of experimental builds during the open source development process have proven to result in final products that are more reliable than their commercial counterparts. In the event of problems, having the source available and modifiable enables the root cause to be found and fixed. With closed software, the only alternative is to reinstall the software and tinker with it’s controls until the symptoms go away or pay the vendor to fix the problem when they have time.
What role does Minoru play in open source?
Minoru Development Corporation is in the business of developing open source software. We have the technical capacity to add new code and documentation to existing open source products and manage new open source initiatives. We also advise software producers and consumers on how to benefit from open source software.
Customer constructed software is an idea whose time has come.
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