Sam,
Obviously, I disagree with you on several points.
> OSMS is exactly what you are proposing with this new organization.
> The main difference is that Fred Trotter trusts Fred Trotter to do the
> right thing but not the rest of us.
That is an assumption. Perhaps I have other motivations, see below.
>
> Obviously, using your own non-conflict-of-interest policy, you do not
> qualify for your own Board of Directors.
I should hope that I am ideal for the Board of Directors. My current
idea is not to include project owners as BoD members. I am no longer
the project manager for ClearHealth, David Uhlman is. MirrorMed is 90%
code-identical with ClearHealth and 100% compatible. As far as I am
aware, I am the single largest contributer to the ClearHealth project
besides ClearHealth Inc employees (who obviously contribute vastly
more than I do). MirrorMed is my trademark for selling ClearHealth. It
would also be my trademark for selling OpenEMR, FreeMED or
UltimateEMR. The whole point of MirrorMed is to allow me to develop on
my own when I need to, but to not create
"yet-another-php-EHR-project". In fact that is where the name comes
from... it is a "mirror" get it ;)
The same is true of FreeB. I view the openemr community as the
maintainers of FreeB v1.x ( the perl version). Again FreeB v2 the php
version is completely based on the ClearHealth billing module.
In all three cases, MirrorMed, FreeB v1 and FreeB v2, someone else is
leading the projects. I am just a developer. In the past I have
developed code for FreeMED and through FreeB I have contributed to
several different projects. I have done VistA development (that should
someday "real soon now" be made public) and I am currently working
with Mirth.
My participant as a developer on several projects and the fact that I
continue to have business interests in Open Source medical software,
should qualify me for a role like this, instead of disqualify me.
Further, I have consistently demonstrated that I am interested in the
movement rather than a particular project. Mirth will soon eclipse my
work in this regard, but FreeB was the first substantial piece of
medical software that was useful to several different projects.
>
> As for Open Source Medical Software (OSMS), the organization was
> chartered to serve all free open source medical software projects. I
> have offered previously in this forum to support any and all of the
> existing FOSS medical software. I was mostly met with suspicion and
> criticism, but the offer still stands.
Honestly, I missed the public offer, but I am sure you made it just as
you mention. However, please do not pretend that this has always been
the position of your foundation. I specifically proposed to you, and
your board that you take on the MirrorMed codebase as a second
codebase to hold under your group besides OpenEMR. If you recall I was
even willing to assign the trademark to your non-profit to make that
happen. Here was the reply you sent me:
> We had out board of directors meeting on Friday. The consensus is ( 3:1
> against a merger) that they still prefer working with the current
> OpenEMR code base. The more experienced developers feel that fixing the
> older code base is not going to be that hard. They prefer the
> functionality that already exists with OpenEMR. I think the issue boils
> down to the fact that that they prefer a different design philosophy
> than what you are using with MirrorMed.
So if the Open Source Medical Software was designed to "serve all
open source medical software projects" rather than just OpenEMR, this
decision is a little confusing. I certainly respect your decision to
not work with MirrorMed, you should be able to do whatever you want.
But you cannot not reject my proposal to work with a different
codebase and then also claim to be project-neutral.
I know for a fact that the charter of FreeMED Foundation also says
that it also can support any Open Source medical software, but
practically speaking the FreeMED Foundation is focused supporting the
FreeMED project. You can tell because all of the people on the FreeMED
Foundation BoD are "FreeMED" people. Just as your foundations board
are entirely composed of "OpenEMR people". Hopefully, by having many
different associations among the BoD members we can achieve a neutral
board, if not the perception of neutral board members.
I would be willing to discuss the possibility of re-purposing the Open
Source Medical Software foundation to do what we had hoped to with the
FMSF. However, just as the FMSF will have no ties with the MirrorMed
project, the Open Source Medical Software foundation would have to
sever its strong ties with OpenEMR. That would mean removing most of
the OpenEMR people on your current board and replacing it from exactly
the same kind of people that we are seeking for our board. My concern
is that then you would need to create another foundation to directly
work with OpenEMR development (which I think is a very good thing) ,
bringing us back to the same problem of needing a new foundation.
--
Fred Trotter
http://www.fredtrotter.com
