Thomas Beale wrote:
>
> But I guess you meant are the tools "free" or public domain?
>
That is the question, what is the cost of entry for 'everyman'.
>
> Our (GEHR's) priorities are:
> - a quality health record, bringing maximum benefit to the patient
> - affordable solutions
>
> In our judgement, the use of good formalisms and tools makes for a significantly
> better result, and does not unduly harm the economics of development (since
> development has to be funded from somewhere - nothing is really free, and the
> cost of wages dwarfs the cost of tools), so we prefer the "quality" approach,
> even if it costs something.
>
I am sympathetic to your issue here, but open source makes another
argument about quality and robustness which is that the more people who
have access to the source code, can examine it, make changes in it, put
it out to test, the higher the quality of the end product.
The collective cost of the community contributed wages dwarfs any one
organizations wage costs.
It has turned out that having a very powerful C,C++,Java environment
for free running on other free environments (gcc and linux for example)
creates such a scenario. That this environment is not what we would like
means that if we are to have open source projects thriving using our
preferred tools, we must make a similar effort to get those tools freely
available to everyone.
While $750/developer may seem like a pittance to those of us
professionally employed in the US, it may seem like a mountain to a
volunteer in another country. There is another subtle sub-text here that
is built in to the high cost western way of doing business, that if you
can't keep up with our expenditures, you can't play in our
neighborhood. I don't think anyone is conscious of this message so I am
not accusing anyone of deliberate intent.
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