[Gnumed-devel] Re: support options for medical practices using GNUmed

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, J Busser wrote:

> One group was looking at getting GNUmed further developed, and to establish a 
> company to provide local support.
The idea is not reall new:

    http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/paper/debian-med-9.html

> Right now, they are "frozen", because 
> commercial vendors have been able to destabilize the process, with warnings 
> that the group's Executive would be "crazy" and other fear mongering.
I spend the last week to convince people that it is not really crazy:

    http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200506_ltk-freebeer/freebeer-notes.pdf

> But anyway in the discussion it was suggested to me that any of IBM, Unisys, 
> Novell, Sierra Systems might be interested both in helping to support 
> Canadian doctors using GNUmed with whatever other additional development 
> would be required. Their interest would presumably be in proportion to the 
> size of the potential market for their services.
I'm not really convinced that GnuMed support is done best by the "global
players".

> One question that I have is whether one of these companies -- supposing 
> Novell -- prefers users to run their preferred distro -- like SuSE --- would 
> we have to be concerned that they would seek to build into the code 
> dependencies on a commercial version of "their" distro or am I worrying 
> unnecessarily assuming we can require an unforked GNUmed to remain multi-os 
> compatible (therefore it would have to be kept multi-distro compatible).
If I would be a business person (which I'm definitely not) I would base
my business on Debian-Med (once it is really fit for beasing a business
modell on it).  I would make sure to do support on a time base ans not
per case - with Debian you normally will not have "cases". ;-)
Sounds like stupid advertising but I'm just quoting people from small
IT companies who did general Linux distribution support and finally
switched them all to Debian.

> Or do people think it would be better for a medical association or group to 
> create a company to provide local support?
I would regards this as the better solution - but hey, I'm no business
expert.

> The advantage would be control. 
Yes!

Kind regards

         Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de