Law School
This morning Kate Somers (IntraHealth Senior Program Development Team Leader) and I went to a class at the UNC School of Law. The class is a contracts law class which is taught by a close friend. What Kate talked about was a recent contract she wrote for a project which we will be announcing shortly. I was there because the project in question will deal very directly with open source technologies and the professor thought it important to explain the work as well as the contract.
The class went very well as it dealt fairly evenly with both our planned initiative, and the details of the contract. I think the point of having us there was both to capture the attention of those students who are very interested in contract law and to show those who might not have as big an interest in the required class how powerful a tool a good contract can be. I would imagine that in the course of their regular classwork these students don’t come across contracts that are quite like the ones Kate has to draw up dealing with an organization like IntraHealth, and the work we do with open source technologies.
For me it was great to note the interest the students had in the work we are doing here at IntraHealth, and more specifically in the Informatics group. Of course, any student is eager to take the opportunity to discuss things outside of those which are assigned, still there were some great questions about our work and the project in question.
I have not been in a college classroom since my own days in college which are too far back now for me to want to mention. Nonetheless, when I was in college there were no such things as laptops. Now, the group of folks staring at the front of the classroom are doing so just over the tops of their laptop screens. In trying to explain why an organization like IntraHealth is working within open source licensing I pointed out that throughout that classroom I could see many Apple computers, some Dells, and a few HP’s. I assumed that most of the non-Apple computers were running Windows. I’m not entirely sure how many people are in that class but perhaps it was around 40 people. If we were to very conservatively assume that the license fee for each machine (just for the operating system) was $200 that would be $8000 worth of operating systems in that room alone. When we go into relatively poor countries, and into relatively poor Ministries of Health and attempt to put in systems with expensive per-seat license fees it typically cannot work. Add to that the fact that specialized systems usually have license fees that dwarf those of operating systems and you can see the problem. All this before we even get to upgrade-fees and the cost of customizing a system to suit the users specific needs.
Of course there are many more benefits to us using open source technologies but in many ways it all comes back to this economic question. For most of us, I think it is safe to say that to help health care workers do their work more efficiently so that they can help more people, we really aren’t concerned whether the tools are open source or proprietary - as long as we are helping them. However, there is an organic path with the finances and with the ownership model that very directly leads us to use and promote open source for this work. When we consider long-term sustainability on top of that, to me, we again come back to open source due to its usual adherence to standards as well as the complete and open access and ownership of the code.
