Hi Folks-
Dr. Jordan Sparks, DMD is a dentist and programmer who has written and
maintained a very nice GPL'd project that he calls "Open Dental." The Open
Dental website is http://www.open-dent.com and he has an active user base who
is using the application in production even now.
Although the project switched away from v1.1 only some time in the past year
or so, Open Dental currently depends upon version 2.0 of the .NET framework.
OD currently runs only on Windows although Dr. Sparks claims that he intends
to have it run also on other platforms using Mono to provide the .NET
dependencies on these other platforms.
All of the OD code is licensed under the GPL.
Two days ago, I decided to make a fork of OD that I've named GNUdental. The
website for GNUdental (or GD) is http://www.gnudental.org
My main priority for GD is to have it run on Linux and Mac OSX in the near
future (less than two months).
Dr. Sparks has been advertising that he will have OD running on Linux as soon
as possible for years now, but about a year or so ago, he made a design
decision to move away from version 1.1 of the .NET framework, so just about
the time that Mono 1.2 was released with a fully-implemented version 1.1 of
the .NET framework, Dr. Sparks stopped using version 1.1 in favor of version
2.0 of the .NET framework for OD (which Mono has relatively poor support for
currently).
OD community discussion takes place at http://freedental.forumco.com/
Dr. Sparks originally used SF to host his project
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedental>, but apparently moved away from
that at some point. According to SF, OD (originally termed Free Dental or
FD) has has been active for a little over four years.
Dr. Sparks has never used any kind of automated source code revision control
system for FD/OD (this he acknowledged recently to me two years ago and has
confirmed recently), and there have apparently been only two or three
programmers (I could be mistaken on this as I've gotten two different answers
from Dr. Sparks on this question) involved in writing code for the project,
including Dr. Sparks himself. All development has taken place in a strictly
Windows environment.
So after donating about $2500 to his project two years ago in the hopes of
accelerating his support in OD for Linux, I now find him moving farther and
farther away from it. As of three days ago, Dr. Sparks had no interest
whatsoever in supporting Linux with his OD project, in spite of fairly
significant interest among the contributors at his discussion forum. If you
read the top 11 topics at http://freedental.forumco.com then you'll note some
rather startling (and amusing) reversals in his position on Linux over the
past couple of years.
Two days ago, I announced on his forum that I have forked OD and thereby
created GD. After I made this announcement, Dr. Sparks announced that he
would be racing to "beat me to the punch." He is strongly opposed to forking
his GPL'd code. I know that his concerns are based upon diluting the
development effort, but given his historical focus on strictly Windows and my
focus on Linux and OSX, I don't think I'll be taking any developers from him
with my fork, so I'm not sure why he's so strongly opposed to the fork.
Dr. Sparks got his first Linux computer about two years ago, though, so he
doesn't have much experience with Linux. From general discussion with him in
email and telephone, I get the impression that he uses only Windows operating
systems for business and personal computing tasks, but he does apparently
have his MySQL database server running on a SuSE box.
Given his track record, I'm not terribly optimistic about OD actually running
on Linux any time soon, but the potential is definitely there, so I'm pretty
excited to get moving on full support in GD for Linux.
So I'm posting here to let people know about this closely-related (to GNUmed)
open source software project, the fork of it into GNUdental, and to see if
anyone here has any direct interest in participating in the development of
GNUdental.
I just finished putting up a Git repository online at
http://git.gnudental.org/gitweb.cgi
This repo contains Dr. Sparks latest release of code for OD as of today. It
was released about two weeks ago, and although Dr. Sparks claims that OD
depends on .NET 2.0, it's not clear just how much code depends on that, and
how much would run fine in Mono. Miguel de Icaza of GNOME and Mono and
Gnumeric fame just yesterday committed Novell resources to moving Mono in a
direction that would aid this step, so there may be hope for getting even
this latest code from OD running in Linux, so the prospects are pretty
exciting.
I remain committed to this fork I made a couple of days ago, however, because
I see exciting prospects for the long-term future of GNUdental (see
http://www.gnudental.org) that I know Dr. Sparks is not interested in (he's
been managing his code in a directory on a Windows box for 4+ years now
rather than any kind of revision control system and he's a Linux newbie by
his own account). Instead, he's heavily focused on adding new features in a
monolithic way to OD and that seems like the wrong approach to me, so I'm
going forward with GNUdental.
Does anyone here wanna help?! Please email me at gd@gnudental.org if so. I
welcome all input. I'll be starting a mailing list for GNUdental soon.
Regards,
Kevin
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