While the partisan gap in Washington is wider than it’s been at any time in living memory, the two parties do have one remarkable agenda in common. Both have proposed cuts in Medicare so drastic that they would have been politically suicidal a decade ago and may still be. Yet neither party is backing off... Read More »

Back in the 1990s, open source software was met with derision from traditional boxed software companies like Microsoft or Adobe. How can you make any money by giving away your product to anyone who wants it? Read More »

When all is said and done, the advancement of telehealth and mobile health in the United States will be accomplished through the percolation of innovation. Read More »

One wouldn’t think of Apple’s Steve Jobs as an open source pioneer. But he was. Apple’s 10-year-old Mac OS X is a closed source operating system with open source components.It is based in part on Darwin, an open source OS originally developed by Apple in 2000 which incorporates code from Jobs’ NextStep, BSD and other free software, according to Wikipedia.  The BSD code in MacOSX, Read More »

This week is Open Access Week, celebrating its fifth year of helping academic and research communities learn more about the benefits of open access and inspiring wider open participation. Read More »

Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of  UNIX and father of the  C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It's no exaggeration to say that without Ritchie, modern computing would not be what it is today. Read More »

Payments from medical device makers to orthopedic surgeons dropped between 2007 and 2010 after payment disclosure became a requirement - there was a reduction in both the total amount paid and the number of individual payments, researchers from The University of Iowa and Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical System reported in Archives of Internal Medicine - part of a Health Care Reform series the Read More »

At the Code for America Summit last week, I introduced to the assembled community of civic technologists and supporters the Civic Commons Legal and Procurement Issues Guide as another tool in the reuse of “code.” It’s interesting to discover through the reuse of software code that there is an inherent ability to reuse another kind of code – regulations, policies and best practices of technology Read More »

Tomorrow at the OpenStack Conference in Boston, Lew Moorman will discuss Rackspace’s intention to form an OpenStack Foundation in 2012, which will be responsible for Project Governance and ownership of the OpenStack trademark. This marks a major milestone in the evolution of OpenStack as a movement to establish the industry standard for cloud software. Read More »

I spent an interesting morning last week in the European Parliament at a presentation of the Innovative Medicines Initiative. IMI is a joint undertaking between the European pharmaceutical association EFPIA and the EU to carry out projects, mostly in pre-competitive research, to help develop new and innovative medicines. Read More »