Hi Sam and Sebastian! On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 03:45, Sam Heard <sam.heard at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > [...] I was taken by some of the issues that Richard > raised [...] the possibility of people claiming that a particular template was > their design [...] SA seems to offer some protection > for that scenario.
You still have not explained how/why you mean that CC-BY-SA offers better protection against this than just CC-BY. > Regarding CKM. I sense that you would prefer it was open source No, I don't have the view that the CKM or anything else used by the foundation necessarily needs to be open source. But I do think that openEHR is about open specifications and open content though, and that it is very important that work/discussions/experiences produced by the community are openly accessible so that they can be reused in many environments and that they can survive tool changes and to avoid vendor lock-in. > We chose to use a closed > source asset management engine from a small company in Australia to get > something working and I believe our team, led by Sebastian, Heather and Ian, > have created something wonderful. Yes the CKM is an important tooI and it was important to get something like this up and running quickly, the current CKM is a great contribution. I am also aware of some of your (Ocean Informatics') reasons for basing the CKM on a commercial product and releasing it as a commercial tool (although available for free to the foundation I assume), I discussed this with Sebastian and others during and after MIE2008. I'm not quite sure if your intention was to keep the entire solution as closed source or if you just wanted/needed to protect the calls made to the underlying commercial package. (Is it http://www.arcitecta.com/mediaflux/ ?) Anyway, the reasons may be any, the most important thing is not in this case the software licence, but the open availability of the clinical content, discussions, reviews etc. (A drawback with the current situation though is that it's hard for others than Ocean Informatics employees to contribute with code/feature improvements or plugins to the de facto standard archetype management tool (CKM) used by and promoted by the foundation. The fact that such contributions would go in to a closed commercial product also makes such contributions less likely.) > It might be that there will be open source > tools that do this job in the future but I suspect these will flourish in > the commercial sector for the time being If the CKM content is openly available and the data formats are open, then there is a chance that open source products (or other competing closed source products) can be used in the future. If not, then we actually have a "vendor lock in". The same goes for all other software packages used by the openEHR foundation, the wiki, version management, issue tracker, specification editing tools etc. As long as there is a working, well documented "way out" that allows the community contributions to be exported without too much hassle, then I believe most people will accept the use of closed source solutions in a setting like openEHRs. This is also a risk management issue, a company behind a closed source product can disappear, run out of resources or simply discontinue support for a product. If I was heading a national program (or an international foundation) considering to use the CKM for important work, then I'd make sure that I either had possibilities and rights to modify to the source code via some agreement, or that there were well documented complete export facilities (and I'd set up a routine to backup the exports) before investing too much time/resources in CKM-based work. On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 08:34, Sebastian Garde <sebastian.garde at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > The web service interface of CKM is described here: > http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/healthmod/CKM+Webservices This is a great start, thanks for documenting and announcing it! > If you are missing something let me know or raise a Jira issue in CKM: > About/Suggest new feature (when logged in). 1. I assume that developer resources are limited and that it would be wiser to spend time on improving CKM features than to make the perfect machine-to-machine interface for every possible content item in the CKM. Thus in order to quickly get the complete export/backup feature discussed above, then maybe a documented, machine readable complete daily CKM database dump in the form of files on a public webserver will probably do the job. (I guess excluding the stored user password hashes might be wise for security reasons though :-) at least until you start using openID and can avoid storing passwords at all...) 2a. Why is reading of the archetype discussions and reviews hidden to people not logged in? When e.g. the discussion thread "Generic name of medication" recently moved from the mailing-list to the CKM, then at the same time it moved from public space to private space, the continued discussion is no longer searchable or cacheable by search engines, internet archives etc. (The commercial wiki engine used by the foundation is for example a lot better when it comes to this kind of accessibility.) 2b. After opening up reading, can you make the CKM content search engine friendly? Best regards, Erik Sundvall erik.sundvall at liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733 (Mail & tel. recently changed, so please update your contact lists.)
