CCTOS:  Technical Collaborations, FLOSS

/

Draft Version 6.8, 8 Apr 2013, Etienne Saliez, ---- Next - Previous - Index of CCTOS Issues,  

• Issues:
  • Many specialized medical services are available as FLOSS, but integration is still far from obvious.
  • Keep in mind that informatics is an evolutive process with request for new versions and new applications, as well with the discovery of new tools.
    
• Approaches:
  • Remark: the full name is normally "Free Libre and Open Source Software", but is often abbreviated as "FLOSS" or "Open Source".
  • Promotion of technical collaborations based on FLOSS principles, sharing software know-how according to the principle of the GPL, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html . or related licences as the EUPL, http://www.osor.eu/eupl , taking account of the European context and legally available in 22 languages.
    
  • An international community of informaticians supported by not for profit organizations.
  • In order to make developments possible across such distributed centers, modularity is a critical issue.
  • Incremental developments makes possible to start early with a minimum, to learn from field experience and to improve one component at at time.  A complete planning in advance would take too much time and would become soon obsolete. Trying to anticipate a little, an initial vision is proposed, but many details will have to be worked out, and the main vision itself will have probably to be adapted in the future.
  • Maintenance:
    • As for any softwares, open source softwares need long term maintenance, which need to be managed.  While in general never licences costs, support services may need to be charged.