[FOSS_health] Re: [openhealth] Re: [oshca_members] OSHCA's Aims and Objectives

[Adrian Midgley]

Molly Cheah wrote:
>
> No Tim. That was Tims' intepretation of what is open source. Frankly,
> PCDOM was being careful of building up its business model and its
> strategic alliances with organisations to ensure sustainability and
> accountability issues which are being built into its PCDOM PrimaCare
> Public License; one that is similar to OpenMRS's Public License.
>





Open Source applications are applications licenced under a licence
listed at the the Open Source Initiative.

PCDOM is not licenced under a licence listed at the the Open Source
Initiative.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

Therefore, PCDOM is not an Open Source application.



> (Please
> see OpenMRS's license as guide if you are that interested at
> http://www.openmrs.org <http://www.openmrs.org>)
>





Interesting, but not a licence under which PCDOM or any component of it
has been (stated to have been) distributed.


Thus far the licence under which PCDOM has been reported on these lists
to have been distributed is "you may not redistribute this software or
its source code".

Which is not a licence listed as OS at the OSI.


Closed source software is legal, some of it is virtuous, by design its
licences are extremely crisply specific.  The difficulty in coming to a
clearly agreed statement of what the licencing regime is for a piece of
software is curious.


OSHCA and these lists have been intended to help people to do difficult
things more easily.  Setting the correct licence, giving an unarguably
correct description of software running on a properly described
platform, progressing toward opening the source code of a medical system
are all difficult tasks worthy of interest, assistance and discussion.

Any chinks left in the licencing or commentaries around it will be
exploited by vendors of closed source systems, and politically it is
undesirable to make or leave those openings.


-- 
A