Next
Previous
Contents
Debian-Med
Free Software in Health Care
v0.2 11 October 2005
Free operating systems such as Linux are widely deployed on all sorts
of servers, and also making inroads on desktop systems run by end
users. The main motivations for this development are security and
total cost of ownership. The end users have particularly been
stimulating the development of free office applications, which have a
wide audience.
As for specialized tasks such as managing a medical practice, there is
a much smaller set of users and thus the number of gifted programmers
among this set of users is drastically smaller compared to everyday
usage. However, Free Software has previously tried to address several
different special fields, in some cases as well as proprietary
alternatives.
This trend actually also makes sense from a commercial perspective, as
support and maintenance require experts with specialized knowledge,
and therefore account for most of the cost anyway. As such, it
becomes reasonable to have a business model in which developers give
the software away freely but then charge for its support.
This paper gives an overview of the current state of Free Software
for medicine ranging from medical practice management up to
microbiological research. Moreover, it sketches how all this software
will be integrated into the Debian GNU/Linux distribution by the so
called Debian-Med project, and explains the motivation for basing the
project on Debian rather than some other distribution.
Next
Previous
Contents