On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 15:17, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> >
> I brought that example up. He was not impressed. Apparently, Clalit 
> went, succesfully, through a court proceeding to enforce such a 
> settelment without even having the actual source mentioned in a contract.
> 

There are two issues: Writing Open Source like, or using it. 

Why does Gilon wonder if he should be developing open source code
in-house? Why does he think he need to accept the "Social Reasons"
behind it? I think the discussion is somewhat off track. 

As an organization, Klalit can rely on OSS to gain some advantages,
mainly: commitment to Open Standards, Interoperability, Reliability, TCO
and Security. 

If this are not good enough reasons, then he probably should stick with
proprietary code. 

In respect to developing in-house, As far as having access to the code
per se,  what will he then do with the source code? And why this is
better than actually developing OSS in house?

I don't see the benefits. He got himself involved in an expensive court
case to gain what? Is Gilon going to continue developing and maintaining
it himself or ask someone else to do it? No matter what it'll be
probably cheaper to buy and migrate to another solution.

When  "Open Source" the worst thing that can happen is that the original
developer will give up and abandon the code. Thing is, if it was a
popular code, or of interest to others, they can continue from that
point. And still it is unlikely when we discuss mature and proven
projects which Klalit might be interested in. 

But this is really beside the point as far as I can see, the true
discussion is about the topics mentioned above (commitment to Open
Standards, Interoperability, Reliability, TCO and Security). 

Source code availability is only interesting in the context of
developers communities and part of a development model and it seldom
relevant to the end user.

BTW Talking of health services, we on whatsup, covered at least one case
of an hospital that got involved with OSS development and seem to be
very happy with the results and benfites. See here (Hebrew) what were
thier impressions on adopting and getting involved with OSS devlopment,
contributing back etc.:
http://whatsup.org.il/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1405 a case 
study orignaly published by LinuxMedNews.


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