Bert Verhees wrote: > Op Monday 06 August 2007 22:38:20 schreef Tim Churches: >> <snip> >> <snip> >> <snip> > >> I'm not sure whether that means it supports queries or not - I suspect not. >> >> So for an open-source implementation of openEHR, it looks like, as at >> August 2007, one has to either wait an indeterminate length of time for >> the ACode implementation to be completed or one has to write an entire >> openEHR kernel (and test and validate it, which is the more >> time-consuming part) oneself. > > I have some opinions on this, I like to express: > -------------- > This is true, I wrote my own version of the kernel, following the specs very > carefully, and heavily inspired by the work of ACode. > > A bit of history and the current situation: > > Discussions around last Christmas, ended up in a way that I decided to go on > on my own way, and write my own data-access layer. First I worked a lot with > Hibernate3, but I came to hate the way you lose control when using Hibernate. > > But a part of the idea of hibernate is good, the fact that it uses derived > classes to make them persistent is good. I followed that idea and I wrote my > own data-access layer for OpenEhr. > > I am about to finish this work. The test-results are very promising. I can > tell you more in only a few weeks. > > It was a big job, but I had to do it, because there was no open source work > done, as you say. > > Sad enough, I cannot publish my work as open source, all by all (not only the > data-access-layer), it took me about a year to do it, and that money I have > to make, to use for that very expensive thing called "living". > > Because my data-access layer is fully based on SQL, and only clear simple > ANSI > SQL, it can be used on a wide range of database-engines, open source, or > closed source, it is just a matter of changing a configuration file. > ------------------- > What and why > > I think, people spend a lot of time/money in OpenEhr, for me as a person, > about a year of living, really a lot of money (for a person, I am not a > student, I have two suns, lovely, but expensive twins) > And for Ocean and ACode, also a lot of human time-spent and so a lot of > money. > This makes it impossible to give it away. I see no other solution then to > keep it closed source. (do you? I am interested in ideas about this.)
I don't know the exact cost, but I suspect that writing and validating a production-quality open-source openEHR kernel (including the query language) to work with popular open-source database back-ends, and with bindings for popular open-source programming languages would cost, say, between $2m and $10m. This is not much money in the big scheme of things, but at the upper end of a the funding range for single research projects. It is conceivable that the philanthropic organisation of a technology company could be persuaded to fund it. It would be easy for a government to fund. It only needs to be funded once, then it would quickly become self-sustaining as other companies move to help support it as part of their health informatics businesses (if it works well, that is). My take is that until there is such an open-source, production-quality implementation, openEHR will remain a mainly academic endeavour and perhaps may gain a niche or small foothold in the health informatics scene, but it won't take over the world. > I regard the *good work* (emphasize this) done by Rong and Thomas and many > others as reference work. That is how they call it. It is a reference-kernel. > You can use it, inspire you're work on it, it is not meant to be working > software. Yes, no criticism of ACode or Ocean Informatics. > OpenEhr, IMHO is *not* an open source project, but an open > specification-project, which is very very good!!! I see no other way to do > it. I agree that openEHR is definitely not an open-source software project, and that it is rather a set of open specifications. I disagree that there is no other way to do it, because I think that open source is the future and that the current closed-source software ecosystem will slowly wither away over the next two decades. But that is some time off, and people will continue to try to make money out of selling closed source software. > So these were opinions which I wanted to express, I am very anxious to hear > others about this subject. My opinion is that there is no compulsion for anyone to produce a completed, open-source implementation of openEHR, but that without such an implementation, openEHR will remain a niche player, a bit of a curiosity. Tim C >> Is that correct? I must save this email for re-use because I have been >> asking this same question for over three years now... > > I hope, by then, OpenEhr will be so much accepted in society that others will > build open source implementations, and many, maybe distributions, like > Linux-kernels. I think that software which does not lead to open source in > time is a failure. > > Me, for myself, I am thinking of building a high performance OpenEhr-kernel > in > C++, I already did some study, looked at automatic garbage-collection-methods > for C++ (without complex software cannot exist, I believe). It could > eventually be generated from existing Java or C# code. > But chances are small I will ever do it, and today we have good byte-code > interpreters, so the performance to gain in C++ may be not very much. >
