Sign the Open Source Letter to President Obama

Description

Dear President Obama,

Congratulations on your historic and unprecedented presidential victory. We, the authors, are proud to live and work in the nation that elected you and hope your presidency will be as successful as your campaign.

As software development professionals and executives, we were encouraged to read about your plan to bring American medical records into the 21st century. We agree that standardizing medical records in a digital format will reduce the cost of health care in this country, improve the quality of care Americans receive, and create jobs.

We also believe in the critical role of open-source software to create the applications and infrastructure necessary to support electronic medical records and other government-funded technology projects. Open-source software has already resulted in dramatic cost reductions in many technology areas, including:

• application hosting & infrastructure, thanks to open-source operating systems, application servers, and other products like Linux, Apache, Tomcat, and others;

• application development and deployment, thanks to tools like Eclipse, Ruby on Rails, subversion, and many, many others; and

• communication and collaboration, thanks to open-source applications such as OpenOffice and WordPress.

But, open-source software isn’t just about providing solutions to general problems. It is also starting to produce solutions for specific, “vertical” industry problems as well. One example of this is TriSano™ from Collaborative Software Initiative, an open source, citizen-focused surveillance and outbreak management system for infectious disease, environmental hazards, and bioterrorism attacks. It allows local, state and federal entities to track, control and ultimately prevent illness and death. TriSano was deployed statewide in Utah the day you became our President.

As you’ve said, we will be judged on what we build, not what we destroy. Building high quality software at much lower costs through collaboration will be a catalyst for good work between software developers in ...

Original URL

http://consideropensource.blogspot.com/

http://consideropensource.blogspot.com/