Gunther Schadow wrote:
>please think about loosening up your tight association between
>"open source" and "Linux". I have nothing against Linux, but it
>opens up the mind if we do not over-constrain our associations.
Wow Gunther, that was quite a nice history lesson on Unix and Open Source.
:-)
Many of the themes you hit on are clearly paralleled in my own experience
working with MUMPS over the last 20 years.
Where you argue against indentifying open source only with Linux, I argue
that open source should not be identified only with Unix, but that there is
also a long tradition of open source development within the MUMPS community,
of which VISTA is an example.
>IS managers did not trust the UNIX world without commercial support.
I believe this sort of conflict with central IS has been a ongoing major
problem for VISTA and many other large healthcare systems.
>It was then 1990 that free Unices
>became a real alternative to DOS on the PC.
This is also the time that I converted our HIS from a mini-computer
based MUMPS to a distributed processing distributed database implementation
of MUMPS (Datatree) that ran on a network of PC's. To the best of my
knowledge, it was far and away the most cost effective platform for building
large scale information systems that existed at that time.
Other HIS's, most notably Brigham and Women's in Boston Mass, had already
led the way in adopting Datatree MUMPS, and as far as I know, they are still
using it with a network that has grown to include over 7000 PC's (my
knowledge of it is a few years old).
>Open source is the spirit of sharing, not a designed business paradigm.
>There is not one inventor of open source, it is a community phenomenon.
>Also don't make open source something owned by
>organizations. Open source is a spirit, a spirit that can be organized to
>death, a spirit that can be commercialized to death.
This point, in particular, hits home in my perception of the history of
MUMPS and VISTA. The official adoption of MUMPS by the VA in the early
eighties was a seminal event (both good and bad) for the community of MUMPS
users, which at that time had a vibrant international sense of community.
While the VA brought a huge infusion of resources into MUMPS and gave us a
valuable legacy in VISTA, it essentially captured the vital center of the
community by the sheer magnitude of its interest, brought it under the
control of a hostile beauracracy, and, I think, led directly to
the eventual monopolization by a single large vendor of what had been an
open standard computing platform.
>To finally answer to Joseph: yes, existing source is the critical step.
>A critical mass of software (not necessarily people) is needed. And of
>course users and user demand is also needed (a problem in hospital health
>care.) So, may be, VistA can become such a thing once it gets free of
>the commercial MUMPs.
There are important lessons for the open source community in the history of
MUMPS and VISTA, particularly as it comes into increasing
competition/cooperation with large corporations and big government.
I hope that the newer ideas and better developed rationale of today's open
source movement can overcome the grip of the large organization and the
large vendor that seems to have enmeshed MUMPS.
>It seems to me that much of what MUMPS tried to do is
>all available on UNIX. The multiprocessing, the files, data bases, etc.
Another way of looking at this, and part of the reason why MUMPS has
become increasingly isolated, is that it offered the major functionality (in
common now with Unix) for building large scale information systems but in a
much simpler package that was highly conducive to building integrated
systems and that could be readily mastered by a single individual and
managed and developed by very small groups. These features are still
important today.
Nonetheless, I agree with you. Unix (BSD/GNU/Linux) is the mainstream of
open source and the building blocks are there that would seem to make a
re-implementation of MUMPS in open source a rather small project. It also
opens many paths of possible transition to and enrichment from other
technologies.
When I call for people to get interested in and possibly help out with
building an open source version of MUMPS, it is not because I think that
MUMPS is the ultimate tool for building healthcare software, but
because I think that building an open source version of MUMPS is the best
path for making a managable transition for existing MUMPS based information
systems to embrace other technologies.
>So, a few people's weightlifting act of dissecting VistA out of the grip
>of the MUMPS-and-only-MUMPS environment could make a big difference.
---------------------------------------
Jim Self
Manager and Chief Developer
VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis
(http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself)
