proprietary software

Welcome to the sixth annual Best of Open Source Software Awards, otherwise known as the Bossies. If you've enjoyed our previous Bossies, you're in for a treat... Read More »

Open source electronic health record systems such as VistA are better than closed proprietary systems in terms of development, innovation and continuous quality improvement, but providers can still make the transition run more smoothly, according to Peter Groen, former CIO of Atlanta VA Medical Center. Read More »

As the problem-plagued roll-out of President Obama’s signature healthcare policy undergoes congressional scrutiny for the first time, we speak with Clay Johnson, a former Obama campaign innovation expert who founded Blue State Digital, the company that built Obama’s 2008 website. During a House panel on Thursday, lawmakers questioned executives of two of the lead contractors behind the website, healthcare.gov — CGI Federal and Quality Software Systems Incorporated — about the myriad of glitches and defects. Johnson says the new website is built with outdated and proprietary software. "When the government is building software like this, it ought to be built out in the open — built with a licensing system called open source so that the public truly owns it," Johnson says. He notes that "In 1996, Congress lobotomized itself by getting rid of its technology think tank called the Technology Assessment Office. So they’re writing bills where they don’t understand the technology required in their laws."

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It's clear that open source is shaking up the technology industry. What isn't yet clear is how this impacts legacy vendors. Read More »

The aim of the EHI CCIO Campaign is to help develop the next generation of clinical information leaders. To provide a junior doctor’s perspective, Carl Reynolds, a self-professed IT enthusiast, is writing a column for EHI on NHS IT. In his second column, he makes the case for open source. Read More »

The Document Foundation’s Italian subsidiary, LibreItalia, said Wednesday that the Italian Ministry of Defense has agreed to adopt LibreOffice, the open-source productivity suite, in October, and that it will create its own online training courses for the new software by the end of 2016. The move was prompted, in part, by an Italian law that mandates the consideration of open-source alternatives to proprietary software for government use, which was originally passed in June 2012. LibreItalia and the military’s IT staff will release the educational material to the public at large under the Creative Commons license.

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