Black Duck Blog

Courtney Spencer
cspencer@blackducksoftware.com
Earlier this year Black Duck Software joined Open Health Tools (OHT). This week we had the opportunity to present at the OHT board member meeting chaired by Skip McGaughey, OHT Executive Director. Peter Vescuso, EVP of Marketing and Business Development, gave an overview of Black Duck’s business and solutions to the membership and outlined the ways we can support the OHT mission and membership.

OHT is an open source community creating an ecosystem of OSS developers and health care professionals dedicated to developing a health interoperability framework, including tools and reference applications. For example the OHT forge hosts Hitex, the Health Information Text Extraction system, one of the many OSS health care projects tracked by Black Duck. Hitex, which is built on top of the GATE framework, provides analysis pipelines and modules to extract health information from clinical documents.

The Black Duck KnowledgeBase of open source projects is a comprehensive information resource on all OSS projects. Within the Knowledgebase, we track and report on the OSS projects specific to healthcare: over 900 projects, representing124 million lines of code and $8B USD of development value and 45,000 staff years (see our analysis reported in the press release referenced above). We offered to the OHT membership to provide custom analysis and information on any and all of these projects to promote their use and adoption. In addition, we encouraged the use of our free code search website www.koders.com with over 3 billion lines of available code and offered our management best practices to the OHT community for managing development with open source to maximize the value while controlling its use.

We look forward to evangelizing the opportunity for OSS to improve the healthcare industry and to support the OHT community.

For more insight into OSS and the healthcare industry, check out the webinar we recently delivered with CollabNet and Brian Behlendorf on how OSS is revolutionizing healthcare.

Courtney Spencer
cspencer@blackducksoftware.com
Yesterday we delivered a webinar in collaboration with Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet, and Brian Behlendorf, open source pioneer, CollabNet co-founder/Board member and independent consultant to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The webinar entitled “Open Source and Open Collaboration: How the U.S. Government is Reinventing the Healthcare IT Industry” described the extensive work going on with open source and open collaboration to create standards and useable code to enable the digitization and trusted transmission of medical data over the Internet.

Tim Yeaton, our CEO here at Black Duck, and Bill Portelli provided an excellent overview of how application development generally is becoming agile, distributed and ‘multi-source’ with open source.

Bill gave a great review of agile in the cloud. He pointed out that “1/3-1/2 of development organizations are using agile methods today.”

Brian Behlendorf spoke on open source and open collaboration in the health care IT industry today. Given his entrepreneurial experience as a founder of the Apache Foundation and CollabNet, I don’t know if there’s a better guy to help drive this important imitative forward. He works directly with HHS to advance the state of health data exchange through initiatives designed to create open standards and open source software.

Brian was quoted as saying “Steps in advancing the national health IT agenda include stimulating technical progress.” He spent time explaining the initiatives and framework of CONNECT, the open source software solution that allows the secure exchange of health information. CONNECT leverages standards but is real software and you’d expect nothing less when Brian is involved. CONNECT’s community portal can be found at connectopensource.org.

Brian summarized the health data exchange initiatives by saying, “Health exchange will be a commodity, but data is the value.”

We had a number of important questions regarding this information packed webinar. We’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on these issues.

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Timothy Kenny
Director of Marketing
Tkenny@blackducksoftware.com
We just delivered a webinar which covered the basics of open source, including open source definitions, and the different types of licenses.

Open Source Software legal experts, Karen Copenhaver and Mark Radcliffe, were both on hand to talk about the associated risks in using open source software. Mark and Karen pointed out that although there are risks associated with using open source, when managed and used correctly, the benefits will outweigh the risk.

Open source software has significant benefits and is free, but it is not free of obligations. Gartner Research recently found that while virtually all mainstream IT organizations leverage open source in one capacity or another, fewer than 30% currently have an OSS governance policy in place. With over 1,900 different licenses available today, each with their own obligations, it can be difficult to properly manage the use of open source.

Karen Copenhaver gave a comprehensive review of the legal framework including intellectual property and licensing. Karen answered questions such as:

• Who owns a copyright?

• What is a patent?

• What is a license and what is a sublicense?

• What is the same between commercial and open source licenses?

• What is different about an open source license?

Mark Radcliffe gave a great overview of the history of the open source movement. Mark pointed out that it was in the year of 1998 where the term “open source” was coined.

Mark also covered the various types of open source licenses which include:

• Restrictive: Requires licensor to make improvements or enhancements available under similar terms. The GPL would be an example of this kind.

• Permissive: Modifications/enhancements may remain proprietary. An example of this would be Apache.

• Single user license: Apple, Lucent

We’d be interested in your feedback as well as any additional questions.

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