Open Source Initiative

Wow. Open Source comes to medical instruments. Of course, hewlett-packard makes great ECG hardware, but for western hospitals, price really isn't their concern. If you could drive the price down, that opens up better medicine to many many people.

Andrew J. Turner (http://www.highearthorbit.com) suggested to me that we need a term for user-created, user-entered, user-discovered, and user-curated data. Of course, if you change "data" to "code" you have exactly what the Open Source Initiative is already doing for software. We could do the same thing for data. Write an Open Source Data Definition, which puts strictures on the attributes of data that claims to be Open Source Data.

These guys (SciPhone) really REALLY ought to get together with some open source developers. Looks like a great product, but it's almost 100% certain that their software stinks. Is it simply that they don't believe that hackers will come togther to write software for their hardware? Do they not know how to build such a community? Are they bound by contracts not to disclose programming information for the chips they've used? Do they not speak English well enough to make a difference in the Open Source creating part of the world?

Let's say that you want to build the highest building in your {village,town,county,state,country}. Your resources are limited, as they always are. Should you start building from the ground up? Or should you make use of the community foundation that Open Source developers have created? Your choice should be obvious. You may choose to build from the ground up, but your competitors are not likely to make that mistake.

In a free market, over time, competition in the production of a commodity product will eliminate all profits. Bread-makers can sell their bread for enough money to cover the cost of the capital invested in the bakery, the cost of the flour, yeast, sugar, and water, the fuel needed for firing, and the salary of the baker. They can earn no more money than that. If they did, then another bakery would be established which would price its products lower, splitting that profit between the customer and the owner of the new bakery.

Sometimes I want to declare victory and go home. Of course, that's usually an admission of defeat, but I really think that with news like Verizon Embraces Linux, that the penetration of Open Source into every sector of computer-using society (which would be ... everything) is inevitable. We've started the snowball down the hill, and there's no stopping it. Not that we would want to! But neither can the foes of Open Source stop it either.