News

French, German, Dutch and Italian Hackathons Fuel UK ODF Plugfest

Hackathons in Toulouse (France), Munich (Germany), Woerden (the Netherlands) and Bologna (Italy) involving software developers and public administrations, are providing input for the ODF Plugfest that will take place in London on December 8th and 9th. The first four meetings involve developers working on the Open Document Format ODF and the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools.

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5 Open Source Projects That Are Improving the World

One of the strengths of the open source community has been its ability to bring concentrated effort to bear on big problems. When tragedy strikes, or a pressing need arises, there are groups of people who gather together to attempt to solve the problems as a community. You may not have heard of these five open source projects, but they are attacking some of the world's biggest problems and making a true impact in people's lives... Read More »

Halamka's Notes on the November HIT Standards Committee Meeting

The November HIT Standards Committee focused on “asynchronous bilateral cutover” - the compatibility of different CCDA payloads, healthcare IT that supports long term services and support,  an update on the Standards & Interoperability projects, a discussion of data provenance efforts, and the HITSC workgroup organization. Read More »

Thoughts on Microsoft Open Sourcing the .NET Platform

Last Wednesday Microsoft announced they are transitioning the server side of their .NET platform to open source. As stated on their website: "Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux." Read More »

Can India Break the Pattern and Do Open Source Right?

The government of India has recently announced a big push into open source as a part of its Digital Initiative. For a country of more than a billion people and thousands of government organizations, I see this as a long overdue move that will hopefully boost the faltering free and open source software communities in India... Read More »

German eHealth Working Group Reasserts Focus on Interoperability

Interoperability of eHealth solutions is getting renewed attention from Germany’s health care organizations. Trouble exchanging information between medical systems is hindering eHealth reaching its full potential, says the Federal Ministry of Health. The ministry made interoperability a key topic at the eHealth working group meeting, part of an IT Summit in Hamburg in October. Read More »

Open Source Companies-Key Tasks: Marketing and Press Relations

Steven Vaughan-Nichols...is here to tell us that marketing is a big part of your job if you want a successful open source company. He has heard a lot of people saying that marketing isn’t necessary anymore. The reason it’s necessary is because writing great code is not enough – if no one else knows about it it doesn’t matter. You need to talk with people about the project to make it a success...

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How Open Source Is Changing the Pace of Software Development

...as new computing architectures and approaches rapidly evolve for cloud computing, for big data, for the Internet of Things (IoT), it's also becoming evident that the open source development model is extremely powerful because of the manner in which it allows innovations from multiple sources to be recombined and remixed in powerful ways. Consider the following examples...

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Is Open Source Tolven the "Dark Horse" of Health IT Platforms?

Is there perhaps a “dark horse” in the EHR field, just poised to challenge the overhyped, slow, clumsy, and expensive leaders of the EHR heat? All the troubles with lack of interoperability and usability of proprietary EHRs have suddenly put the spotlight on what may be the EHR dark horse, the open source Tolven Platform.

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Composable Software, Collaborative Development, and the CareWeb Framework

The CareWeb Framework (CWF) enables the software developer to build complex, richly interactive, web-based applications in a modular fashion...The CWF has been used as the basis for a complete EHR and CPOE system and has been ported to several open source EHRs, including OpenMRS, VistA, and RPMS. The CWF is open source software built upon open source software. Read More »