Stephen,
You are the second person who has approached our
community about using a hybrid patent/open source business approach.
I had already decided to work with the first group, and
your comment has urged me to move this higher on my priority list. I
will try to communicate with you offlist regarding exactly how to move
forward.
You should know that I, and others within this
community, will work with you only with great hesitation. Many in our
community, including me think that generally, patents are immoral. We
are unique in the FOSS community in that it really is a high-stakes
moral game that we are playing. If Microsoft has patents on the Xbox.
Who cares really? If they have a patent on HealthVault, then some
life-saving idea that they have in there could be trapped for 20
years.
This creates what I lovingly refer to as the " health
software patent paradox"
"The degree to which a medical software is innovative and useful, and
is therefore patentable, is directly proportionate to degree to which
it is immoral to pursue patenting"
What if a car company created a new safety device that reduced car
accident deaths as easily and cheaply as seatbelts do currently.
Innovative? yes. Patentable? probably. A technology unethical to trap
in the hand of one car company? Clearly.
I cannot see any substantive HealthIT patent that does not fall into
this moral quandry.
However, I recognize that I am unlikely to convince you regarding this
matter, and I also see that you are reaching out to us in a friendly
manner. So if you will take my reluctant help, I would be glad to give
it.
First please read what I have already written on the subject of
licensing medical software. Much of it may not apply to you. But it is
useful context for you to have.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/sharing_medical_software_foss_licensing_in_medicine
Second, from what I have seen on your blog you have some confusion
about what open source means. You wrote there
> Note that there are dozens of other open source licenses,
> including those that prohibit derived work and free sharing.
> Very complex indeed!
This is not true. If a license does these things then it does not
meet the Open Source definition. The issue is confusing, but not
particularly complex. The OSI makes the definition. The OSI approves
the licenses. If it does not meet the definition AND make the list,
then it is not an open source license.
A glance at your technology stack indicates that your patent involves
using a thick-client spreadsheet as a front end to some sort of data
network. Frankly, I seriously doubt that a patent that you got as
recently as 1998 with a technology description that is as general as
the one that your blog describes will not have substantial prior art
available. Ergo, I doubt your patent is valid.
Further, in the current FOSS community, we are aggressively pursing
multiple AJAX interfaces, as well as really smart, XML based plumbing
to move data around. Thankfully, these standards-based technologies
are largely unpatentable. They work so well, that I doubt anyone here
will bother to implement your technology. Feel free to convince me and
others otherwise, but market speak like:
"interact at the presentation level, which creates an interoperable
platform for the simple, secure, fluid exchange of reports between
disparate system architectures through the transmission of content
stored in delimited files."
This kind of broad, glowing descriptions sound marvelous, but mean so
much (whatever you want them too) that they might as well mean
nothing. If you could give me an example of something your technology
does right now that is not found in the combined technology pool of VA
Vista, OpenMRS, ClearHealth and Mirth, I would be very very surprised.
I say that because I will try and help you, but I need to be sure that
you understand that I am helping you because I think it is important
that we, as the FOSS community, work with patent holders to arrange
for a peaceful resolution to patent problems. I am not working with
you because I am impressed by your technology. Perhaps I will be
impressed later on, but I am certainly not impressed now.
Given that, you should take a look at this page
www.rosenlaw.com/IC-Business-Model.pdf
Which outline an effort to create a "Patents, Free for Open Source
everyone else pays" strategy. I am working with Larry Rosen now to see
how best to apply this to a medical environment.
Regards,
-FT
--
Fred Trotter
http://www.fredtrotter.com
