closed source software

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Big Tech Should Stay Out of Healthcare

Matthew Buck | Washington Monthly | December 2, 2019

...The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Google's Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, "also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show." That detail raises a key question that's largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?...An alternative path exists. In the 1970s, the Veterans Affairs Administration (VA) developed VistA, an open-source code system that was the country's first EHR system... Read More »

Heartbleed, an Apache License Business Model Failure?

The two year old HeartBleed bug that was recently discovered in OpenSSL and that affects millions of internet users, reveals a similar problem that could have a serious impact on the way we look at open source software. Companies such as Cisco have built expensive applications on top of OpenSSL. Security consultants have been paid good money to guarantee that OpenSSL was safe. But the OpenSSL project itself was driven by a core of only four unpaid volunteers. The German engineer Robin Seggelmann is now taking the blame for the error. His code was verified by Dr. Stephen Henson who overlooked the bug. It would be unfair to blame these two individuals for the problems caused by Heartbleed. They made two mistakes. The second mistake was a minor error in their code. Although this error took huge proportions, they should be forgiven for that error. Their first mistake was their choice to make their code available under the Apache Software License. That mistake is more problematic.

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Metriport Launches First Open-Source API to Instantly Pull Patient Medical Records from Any Electronic Health Source

Press Release | Metriport | September 21, 2023

Metriport, the company on a mission to provide instant and efficient access to comprehensive patient medical data, is launching its Medical API - the world's only healthcare API platform built entirely on open-source code-to retrieve patient clinical histories from all major electronic health records (EHR) systems. With an innovative engineering approach, Metriport delivers a wealth of enterprise-grade patient information to organizations ranging from very large healthcare providers to the new, smaller telehealth clinics, and in the process, saves the companies sometimes millions of dollars over existing contracts. Gaining access to electronic health records can be so costly and cumbersome that digital providers often resort to faxes, phone, and lengthy patient surveys resulting in valuable information being missed, as well as greatly increasing the likelihood of incorrect medical data, both with potentially grave consequences.

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UK institutionalizes preference for open source over proprietary IT

Molly Bernhart Walker | FierceGovernmentIT | March 20, 2013

The U.K. national government issued March 14 a beta version of its Government Services Design Manual , which formalizes a preference for open source technology for digital services..."Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages," instructs the manual. Read More »

Understanding the Cyber Resilience Act: What Everyone involved in Open Source Development Should Know

The European Union is making big changes to cybersecurity requirements with its proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). You may have heard about the CRA’s potential impact on the open source ecosystem. But what does the Cyber Resilience Act mean for you? This post is an introduction to the Act and explains how it may affect the open source maintainers and developer community. Note that this post is based on a draft of the CRA from September 15, 2022. The Act is still in a draft stage and getting feedback, and its provisions may differ before it is passed into law. The Cyber Resilience Act was introduced by the European Parliament in September 2022. Its purpose is to establish cybersecurity requirements for devices and software marketed in the EU. Everybody who places digital products in the EU market will be responsible for additional obligations around reporting and compliance, such as fixing discovered vulnerabilities, providing software updates, and auditing and certifying the products.

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Use open source software - it makes things better, says UK

Toby Wolpe | ZDNet | March 18, 2013

Open source gets the official seal of approval from the UK government in new guidelines that mandate its use over proprietary products. Read More »

Why Isn't All Government Software Open Source?

The federal government is the single largest purchaser of code in the world. So why is this code — taxpayer-funded and integral to the day-to-day working of our democracy — so often hidden from public view? There are two sides to answering that question: Why does the government so often build on closed platforms, and once built, why isn’t the code released to the public? Read More »