belaboring the obvious
I'm fairly certain anyone reading this already knows what I am about
to say -- but I am in the trenches working on a day-to-day basis at a
Federally Qualified Healthcare Center on an NT based system suffering
overt hostility to anything open source or free.
To me, this is something to be considered a daily humiliation. No
on-the-fly updates, weakness in terms of modular security, etc.
Viruses, hello kitty worm or whatever in the e-mail that no BSD, Linux
or Unix administrator would have to worry. I don't envy my IT
personnel at all.
My County Public Health apparatus apparently played with open source
solutions only to find themselves tied to a singular incompetent
provider of services without getting that they could go elsewhere
instead apparently personalizing the problem.
While this thread is of course concerned with far more lofty issues a
few salient comments might be of use, as many in my facility will
recognize the high-end quite readily without realizing they might have
it all of a piece.
It is important to make clear the connection between peer review in
software and in medicine. I really don't think this has been made
plain. It will be obvious to medical professionals right away what's
going on when the matter is placed in this way. This concept is
readily comprehensible to any medical person and should be stressed.
There is no medicine without it, and there are times when I wonder if
it in fact does more in software than it does in medicine although I
must hope that isn't really true. It is by definition a merciless and
purely scientific concept.
Secondarily, (and why I kept silent on our move to a proprietary
system in the absence of a complete alternative at that time), billing
has to made clean. Again, I am not sure if that is really worth the
efforts of the free software element because it's a lot of stupid
idiotic nonsense here in North America not really worth the writing
but the fact also remains if free software is to replace insecure
proprietary offerings then there has to be a back end for the
infuriating North American billing system, something that certainly
could not be offered by GNUMed at the time of the changeover cited
above and not even the FOIA efforts being kicked up off of the VA
software for clinics which was not complete at that moment either.
So what am I stuck with? Crappy, insecure software which insults me
every day and threatens to take over the world with insecure buggy
expensive garbage... I know, my poor cousin worked on Outlook -- I
told him then what I thought....but here I am....suffering.....with
Outlook, this insecure, insult to software writers everywhere years
later. I ask you, why? It may be better the high-end should be
concentrated on imaging and such, I can't say. It is a question, not
an answer. But someday I hope you might get to us, too.
Keep well,
A.
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