A Consulting Firm Transition to Open Source Health Software (Part 2 of 2)

The previous section of this article covered the history of HLN’s open source offerings. How can it benefit from this far-thinking practice to build a sustainable business? The obvious place to turn for funding is the Centers for Disease Control, which lies behind many of the contracts signed by public health agencies. One way or another, a public health agency has to step up and pay for development. This practice is called custom-developed code in the open source policy memorandum of the federal Office of Management and Budget (p. 14 of the PDF).

Andy OramThe free rider problem is acute in health care. In particular, the problems faced by a now-defunct organization, Open Health Tools, were covered in another article of mine. I examined why the potential users of the software felt little inclination to pay for its development.

The best hope for sustaining HLN as an open source vendor is the customization model: when an agency needs a new feature or a customized clinical decision support rule, it contracts with HLN to develop it. Naturally, the agency could contract with anyone it wants to upgrade open source software, but HLN would be the first place to look because they are familiar with software they built originally.

Other popular models include offering support as a paid service, and building proprietary tools on top of the basic open source version (“open core”). The temptation to skim off the cream of the product and profit by it is so compelling that one of the most vocal stalwarts of the open source process, MariaDB (based on the popular MySQL database) recently broke radically from its tradition and announced a proprietary license for its primary distinguishing extension...