>> On Wednesday 20 September 2006 07:38, Andrew N. Shrosbree wrote: >> >>> 4. Your altruistic motives will be derided by your competition, with >>> doubt being cast on your true agenda >>> >>> 5. You will be vilified by the opensource community if you dare to >>> deviate from their puritanical, idealistic view of software. Honestly I think it's a shame Andrew has come to feel this way, certainly it's a tough slog in the commercial world.
In terms of software development, you do have to choose either the "low road" or the "high road" If we start doing this with professional programmers from the get-go, then, yes, it all starts getting very hard very quickly, and serious, presumably taxpayer, cash up-front is required. We all know that simply isn't going to happen. The "low road" is using local volunteers and cheap overseas contractors, with essentially no cashflow: if you have donor money, you spend it on Russian coders, no money, you proceed more slowly. Sure, this means no real marketing or proper support, so you first generation of users is completely limited to the initiates of medical IT on this list. If that's where it stops, frankly I'm happy. If it makes one commercial vendor port their software to Qt and postgres, to head us off as competition, I consider my job done. However, if the product is good, other people want to use it too. They want hold-your-hand support: they flip out the chequebooks, and a 'real' business organisation forms. We all know support costs, and no-one has ever had a problem with being expected to pay for it. The other factor is the importance of network effects in medical comms, which don't apply so much in EMRs, which I suspect adds some extra vitriol in the market as some players feel it's 'kill-or-be-killed' in the race to become the Microsoft of messaging. Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
