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

Andy Oram | EMR and HIPPA | September 7, 2016

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.

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How Gratipay Helps Solve the 'Free Rider' Problem

By Opensource.com | December 20, 2016

Open source has come a long way, but the "free rider" problem still exists. In a lightning talk at All Things Open, Chad Whitacre shared how his company, Gratipay, is helping companies pay for open source software. While companies like Red Hat have figured out how to make open source development sustainable, Whitacre points out that there are still big parts of the open source ecosystem that aren't sustainable. These projects are plagued by what he calls the "free rider" problem...

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