Re: Open Source Developer (Economics)

>
>
>The discussion I wish to initiate is based on various published reports that
>indicate the lack of OSS with respect to "business critical" or "Mission
>Critical" software that can effectively compete with SAP, ORACLE finance,
>ORACLE HR, SIEBEL,  to name a few examples.
>

Actually, the seeds of such software exist in the form of VistA, the set 
of hospital and clinical management software tools a small group of IT 
people inside the Veterans Administration started developing way back in 
the 1970s, based on a system whose development started at Massachusetts 
General Hospital in the 1960s, that now runs all 170 VA hospitals and 
quite a few others in Europe. See http://www.va.gov/vdl/ to learn more.

I was not aware of this project myself until yesterday, when I met the 
CEO of a small company that's hoping to become "the Red Hat of Medical 
Management Software," based on the VistA packages, which are all public 
domain. I'm writing article that *briefly touches* on this right now, 
and will write a more extensive one later.

But from what I've seen so far, this looks like an enterprise-ready 
system with many modules that could easily be adapted for use by 
non-medical businesses.

- Robin