Hi, At the behest of many of the vendors and individuals within the community, we are now announcing the creation of the Liberty Medical Software Foundation.
http://libertymsf.org This organization will exist to be our HIMSS, our EHR vendor association and, if needed, our CCHIT. It is intended to serve both the needs of the FOSS vendor community, and the community of individual developers and clinical users of FOSS EHR software. It is intended to be a place where FOSS companies like Medsphere or ClearHealth can sit at the same table with FOSS friendly proprietary companies like Misys and DSS! This is intended to be a place where a single developer from OpenEMR will be shown the same deference and respect as the CEO of IBM. We cannot afford an Open Source vs. Free Software divide in our community. That is the reason we chose the term 'Liberty' for our name. Openness is good, but it is not enough, we need freedom. But we cannot go around having the conversation: "When I say Free, I do not mean what you hope it means. You hope it means costless. In fact I plan to charge quite allot of money for this free stuff, but you will have freedom when I am done. Of course it is -often- true that when I say free I mean that you can just download it off sourceforge for no cost. So I mean 'Free-as-in-freedom' and 'free-as-in-beer' at different points in this conversation and you are expected to keep up based on context clues." The vendors are going to have trouble trying to sell 'free' stuff no matter how you cut it. Also, even if we wanted to use Open, everyone and their dog has an organization that begins with 'Open' I can rattle off seven without thinking hard. When we previously discussed starting something like this using the term 'Free' people got pretty huffy. Liberty is the compromise. You might be paying millions for the deployment of software that you can download from sourceforge for no cost, and that is OK but what you need to have is 'Liberty'. I hope everyone is as please with this compromise as I am. We will be announcing membership and leadership shortly, but you can be assured the usual suspects will be involved or at least invited. Our first project, and the reason that we are unveiling this now, is to activate the community in support of the Health IT Public Utility Act of 2009. We have created a petition that we will be submitting to generously to congressional representatives. (Just go to our homepage) Note that we specifically choose a petition engine that allows you to sign with comments, and those comments will be passed along as slightly modified petitions. Essentially this is a way for you to both sign a letter to Congress, and also send an individual note, with LibertyMSF doing most of the grunt work. (Note: Dr. Billings did much of the content of the petition in his letter published here earlier) Most importantly, you can forward the petition to your email contacts, or your favorite social network. If you are reading this, and you agree with the basic principles outlined in the legislation, please take it upon yourself to get ten people you know who are not in this community to sign the petition. I want to be clear: The only thing this community has going for it politically is being right. The profit margins of the average large proprietary EHR vendor will always dwarf the resources of even our largest vendors. They can always leverage their vendor lock-in to force more and more money out of their customers. We simply cannot compete with their lobbying dollars. We have to organize and mobilize. We need to reach out to the larger FOSS movement. We need to get out local Linux Users Groups or Python users group or PHP or whatever, aware of the basic tenants of our argument. We need to reach many, many more doctors. We need to get nurses involved. VistA has proven that the only way to solve the problem of healthcare automation is through the use of collaborative development that is only possible inside the VA with a single shared employer who owns everything or the use of FOSS licenses outside the VA. Please also signup for an account on LibertyMSF.org so that we can get ahold of you. We do not have direct access to the details of petition signers. Please email me personally if you are interested in fomenting a local chapter of LibertyMSF in your area or something like... Regards, -FT -- Fred Trotter http://www.fredtrotter.com
