On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 16:27, Seref Arikan <serefarikan at kurumsalteknoloji.com> wrote: > Let me specialize Tom's argument: as far as I know, no member of the openEHR > community who is putting his/her work out there for others to used freely, > is getting paid just for doing so.
We don't get any extra up front payment for putting things out freely, but certainly many of us (probably including you and Tom) have had some kind funding that at times allows us to do openEHR related stuff on paid time. It's actually easier to get certain kinds of funding if you let your work out freely, sometimes it's more or less a requirement. (I don't say that it's easier to get _private_ investor money for open source, but enough of the big openEHR end users will be governments and public health care providers in the long run.) In cases when openEHR work is funded by taxpayer money (like EU- and national projects) then I personally think it's bad manners not giving results away for free, but I know others that probably will disagree. > People's work > on openEHR in their own companies, environments are not relevant unless they > end up being available to the rest of the community, True. I tried to use similar thoughts as an explanation of how things go a bit slower when that road is taken. Any wider dissemination of implementation experiences will then depend on the goodwill and available time of the people in such companies. Even if the goodwill is there, then there is still a dissemination bandwidth problem when doing research and development primarily in closed instead of open environments. We all understand that there are other more pressing needs in a company, needs that must be prioritized over documenting and sharing your implementation findings with the general public. That is a reason to aim for shared open research and development if speed is an issue and if any good business model allows it. > and there are very few > instututions who let their intangible assets go into public domain. Not true. http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/ http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/ http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html http://developer.apple.com/opensource/ (e.g. http://webkit.org/) http://oss.oracle.com/ http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/newto/#9 (While at IBM, some might like the heading "Open Standards Are Not Born; They Evolve" at http://www.ibm.com/ibm/governmentalprograms/ipos.html ) Why do you think these giants often cooperate in open projects? One reason is that open source is a very clever way to share risks and talent. Would it really be better for the Yahoo and Facebook brainshare in e.g. the hadoop project to just fund the Apache foundation to employ some hadoop developers and maintainers rather than having their own Yahoo and Facebook employed engineers actively contribute? Yahoo and Facebook surely do sponsor the Apache foundation in general, but the invested time is a lot bigger sponsoring. See who sponsors... http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html ...plus the amounts, _and what the money is used for_... http://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html ...it isn't really for research and development costs is it? > We need to do a huge amount of work, and I personally don't see this work > being done in any other way than a properly funded, planned, and managed > approach. One of the best things that can happen to open source projects (and probably also to open specification projects) is that a big financially strong users (preferably more than one) start using it and invest time and engagement.(See e.g. the Hadoop story at http://cutting.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/joining-cloudera/ ) In the case of openEHR such users could be national health IT-programs and local health care providers with their own IT staff. Probably openEHR interest will remain a bit low until there are more and better free demo systems though, and until then risks are that funding will be at the same low levels as now. (I hope to be proven wrong about the difficulty in getting monetary funding directly to the foundation in it's current form.) So perhaps I really should try to shut up and code+publish instead to speed up my part of demo development. Just one more try with the most urgent openEHR problem before I stop: On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 22:45, Sam Heard <sam.heard at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > [...] the world of > archetypes (the 99% of standardisation that is yet to be carried out!). The > corollary is that only when there are enough high quality archetypes freely > available does the argument for this separation is compelling. I agree with Sam that most of the interoperability work, the archetype development, is still left to do (and agree with most other things said in that well formulated mail). That's why I and many others (e.g. Thomas Beale, Andrew Patterson, Martin van der Meer) have tried to be very clear on the risks of not opening up the licence of the archetypes to CC-BY rather than the current infectious CC-BY-SA. See: http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+IP+License+Revision+Proposal With CC-BY the big players (NHS et al) can let their clinicians cooperate in global archetype development on paid time, and they won't have to even bother about the potential risk that the hard to grip openEHR-foundation central decision process does anything stupid to lock in their invested work. They can leave whenever they please and take a copy of their invested work with them. That freedom then becomes a reason to actually stay. (Even Google knows this, see http://www.dataliberation.org/ ) I think the openEHR foundation board still has miserably failed to communicate their reasons for stopping or delaying a licence change of openEHR hosted archetypes from CC-BY-SA to CC-BY. Some of us have seriously started discussing archetyping of data sent from medical devices, including proprietary ones. Should device people come begging the foundation to liberate certain archetypes from the SA bondage every time they find use for one (and how long would that take) or would they be forced to go the anti-interoperable way and start archetyping such things from scratch in a track separate from the openEHR CKM archetypes? I have even heard people say that copyright issues is a potential reason not to use international openEHR hosted archetypes as a basis for national eHealth work. Why not simply eliminate such an argument with CC-BY? Couldn't somebody else than Sam from the foundation board try to explain their reasoning this time to see if they can explain better? Best regards, Erik Sundvall erik.sundvall at liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733
