ELSIE CASUGAY wrote:
This whole thing VISTA-OFFICE is entirely unfair not only to the physicians
but also to vendors. I feel like it is being controlled by some group. This
VA software is FOIA and supposed to be open source but I have to take a test
now if I want to support a physician's office. What if I want to help a
clinic? Does that mean that I am not a qualified vendor? I have 20 years
experience with VISTA and installed VISTA/CPRS for a private physician in
2001 down in Raleigh, NC without any problem and now I have to be tested to
support it.
Whatever happened to business opportunities?
It is not clear what licence it is being released under. So it seems
too early to say what is going on.
As a point of information:
Open source is usually one of two licence styles. BSD style and GPL style.
The BSD style, which is what public domain comes under, allows a
person to take code and do whatever they like with it: extend it, make
it proprietary, distribute it and not release the source - like
microsoft did with parts of BSD code in their operating systems, at
least in the past. This means that there is a danger of a vendor lock-in.
The GPL style has one basic restriction - a restriction that somewhat
paradoxically *increases* freedom for the user in the longer time
scale. The restriction being that if the user decides to distribute
the program further, the source code must be made available further
too. The consequence of this requirement is that the code can be
developed further by the user, and that you can not ever be locked in
by the vendor.
Because of this, a lot of people, including me, regard GPL as the only
sensible code licence in the long term for medical purposes.
However, one catch is that there is no warranty in GPL licenced code
(essentially because there is no fixed vendor).
It seems to me that the idea behind the certified support release of
VISTA-office is to roll out the system in a supported way, so that
incompetent people do not install it and botch it up. In sue-happy
America, that is something the VISTA-office people and Medicare would
have to worry about.
I think the way forward for the VISTA-office people is to require an
indemnity from anyone who wants to install it on their own without
support from a certified vendor.
regards
PJ
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