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

[Carlos Moro]

Hi all,

J Busser wrote:

> A few doctors from various parts of Canada have gotten in touch to
> ponder how to solve the dilemma wherein doctor groups may say
>
>     "Open Source - it may be fine, but *who* will support it?"
>
> One group was looking at getting GNUmed further developed, and to
> establish a company to provide local support.

Sounds really exciting....

> 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).

I'm not an expert in distributions, but most of the software included is
never specially designed for any of them. Our dependencies are not quite
strange, so I can't figure why GNUmed couldn't be multi-distro by
essence. It should work perfectly in any *nix system. Regarding to
specific distributions, there would be 2 points:
    a) the effort of the distro-makers to provide the most suitable
packages and dependency integrity. Some would just include them and
other specially interested would test and take a lot of care
everything's ok so GNUmed runs out of the box.
    b) distro specific integration mini apps, scripts etc... could be
developed (by anyone interested) and included in cvs tree (if required
and it's seen ok)...

> Or do people think it would be better for a medical association or
> group to create a company to provide local support? The advantage
> would be control. But would a big disadvantage be that even if you
> hired smart people who understood the business of IT, you would be
> challenged to "grow" (scale) the support as hopefully more doctors
> start to use GNUmed?

I don't know almost anything about business  but if more doctors use it,
that company wouldn't be able to get the required extra resources?

Best regards,
carlos


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