emilykillian wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2005:
I posed a series of questions to Fred Trotter via e-mail. He said it would be OK to share them with the community.
His responses follow my questions (which are denoted with an asterisk):
* I am quite curious about your business model and intentions with respect to FreeB and OpenEMR. Could you explain further?
Yes. We plan on focusing our profit model exclusively on developing ClearHealth. We feel that this will encourage other groups to provide support. We will support ClearHealth but it will only be to enable large development deals, we would even consider outsourcing this support some day. We are a development shop and alot of the answers to the following questions reflect that bias.
* Hypothetically speaking, if the two projects were merged, who would control the project?
I would and I know that is a problem. It is a problem because you have little reason to trust me, and to have me as a project manager you would have to be able to. But there is no alternative. Here is why…
Successful open source projects have one of two control
models. 1. A benevolent dictator or 2. A council of some kind. The best kind of benevolent dictator is like Linus. Linus is guaranteed to be impratial because he does not take money directly from those who make money on linux. That means that no one ever questions his motivation for technical decisions. Unfortunatley that only works because OSDL is funding him, and they are not likely to fund me any time soon.
The other is control shared with several people, like the
Apache foundation. The problem there is that there are very few people who have established themselves as trustworthy in the industry. I feel I have (but dont trust me, talk to Ignacio from LMN. He is the journalist from our industry).
* Is the project manager going to be open to outside developers adding to the code (without financial contributions)?
Absolutley, we want this very much. I can promise you that
if you write good code (a big if) that also does useful things
(another big if) I WILL include it in ClearHealth. We are already
scavenging all of the good code from FreeMED and OpenEMR as it is.
* To whom will developers assign intellectual property rights?
They won’t. They will retain full copyright to the code they write and contribute back under the GPL. The only thing that we might ask for is enforcement rights, so that if we ever have to sue someone for trying to close source ClearHealth we can take the position of the copyright representative.
* On a scale ranging between "wide open" and "totally closed," how open is the project going to be?
Wide open to good ideas and good code. Very closed to bad code. Please understand that Uversa has rewritten 100% of the code that I personally wrote. They did this because it was not up to thier standards. I am having to learn to write code to this high standard, everyone else will too.
* Is this going to be what some have called a "new, from-scratch" billing engine for OpenEMR?
Yes and no. Yes, there is a brand new from scratch billing engine. There will be a migration path from OpenEMR. We are
writting those scripts now. We will not support or code in OpenEMR. The code is not good enough. If you are in love with OpenEMR, you are welcome to port FreeB2 to it. It is designed for that. I will provide all the encouragement, advice and documentation that I can. But I will not contribute a single line of code to that effort, b/c I think it is a waste of time.
*I’m trying to make mental connections between things and any background Information you could give me would be helpful.
Sure. Here is what it boils down to.
1. There has to be a benovelent dictator, because there is no other way right now. There just is not a group with the working dynamics to make a council and there is no money to support a benevolent dictator seperate from commercial interestes of some kind.
2. David and I are the only two people who are qualified to do it. David is the best technically but he wants to bigger things than just this, I am the only person that has successfully developed good relationships with other projects than my home project. So far FreeB is the single most ported piece of code in our community. TkFP uses it, OpenEMR uses it, ClearHealth and FreeMED built their systems on it, and VistA and TORCH have it included in thier project plans. No one else has made provable progress at collaborating between projects, no one else has actually done anything to unify the community.
3. Uversa is commited to "separation between church and state." There will be two Web sites, a .org that points to a community development system that everyone will have access to, and a .com version that will focus on the services that Uversa offers. The .com site will be only one of the sites that the .org points to for services.
4. To further that end, we wil be having community developed free documentation available for everyone. Our goal is to make the project the best it can be, and that means sometimes sacrificing cash, we are OK with that. The project will be run with the goal of being the best technically, not what makes the most money for Uversa. The irony is that this policy will eventually make us the most money anyway.
5. Make no mistake we are in this to make money. But we will be using both the GPL license AND the Open Source development model. We understand how valuable a community is and we dont intend to screw anyone.
6. I am not going to ask you to "trust me". Rather, examine my past record and watch my future behavior. You will find that you may not agree with my stands on issues, but you can trust me to be consistent on those issues.