On Wednesday 08 November 2006 11:20, Ross Davey wrote: > love to change all this and not charge at all. We also 'market tested' > charging GPs and specialist for support and got a far stronger negative > response than Horst 'giving us a serve' on this forum. We put aside > that idea quickly. This is an important point: there's no use pointing the finger at Argus [or Tom Bowden, really], as they are just giving the punters what they want: free support cross-subsidised by the path+radiol firms. The big problem with this is that it's hard to reconcile this business model with open standards, as this means the payers (path+radiol +/- other specialists) can 'escape' to another comms product (possibly open-source, but not necessarily) which doesn't cross-subsidise, leaving the first provider just providing free services to GPs, as you correctly point out, this doesn't work, nice as it might be.
Nevertheless Argus, and, to a certain extent, MO, are willing to take it on, and should be applauded for doing so. Let me utter a heresy: it doesn't matter a jot whether Argus or any other comms product is open or closed source, or what's in their constitution and who's on the board of directors. What matters is open standards, so we can choose between alternatives, or, [as Dr. de Bhal rightly challenges us] pull out our collective fingers and write a "truly open-source" implementation. > There are a couple of other rationales for having a licence key for > which we again couldnt come up with a satisfactory alternative. (By > 'satisfactory' I mean 'wouldnt create more headaches than we currently > have' or 'wouldnt compromise entirely our sustainability' or 'wouldnt > degrade our service or product from a user point of view') - I know I > will get a strong response from Horst on this one - I am waiting and > ready to duck! :-[ It is also a requirement of the HeSA Developer licence. > The success and utility of the Argus Uses Directory (central LDAP) Would you allow non-Argus clients to query this server? (the "certain extent" of my comment on MO relates to access to the directory) > We will always listen to you Horst. (In fact I am working in the > background to try to get support to become more 'free' in line with your > wishes) It seems that half my time is spent with staff trying to work > out how to do things better and we still are trying. Ross, I would argue that free support is *bad*, as it impells you closer to the HealthLink business model in order to fund it. I (and I suspect Horst) would like an *unsupported* no-registration version, and would be willing to pay you by the hour if (for some reason) we needed help getting it to work. IMHO you should target this version to Linux with no graphical installer, this will stop the "Where's the Any Key?" brigade from downloading it and then throwing a tantrum when they don't get their free support on a silver platter. Yes this means your userbase becomes slightly larger than your client database, by about 4 users. You add add our names and e-mails from the archives of this list, if you like ;-) Ian You correctly pointed out the need to _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
