Contents

Why do people use FLOSS?

Having developed several scenarios for where the use of FLOSS within health and the health services might be in 5 years, and then explored a preferred scenario, to determine what were the main drivers and barriers to the realisation of that scenario, the meeting moved on to look at why people currently use FLOSS. The discussions explored both why meeting participants who use FLOSS do so, and why participants thought other FLOSS users might do so. The aim of this was to work towards, in the final part of the meeting, identifying which areas might be most likely to yield benefit if efforts were put into them in the promotion of FLOSS.

Participants produced an extensive list of reasons why they themselves used FLOSS, and why they thought others might use open source (appendix 6). The reasons were distilled, through several iterations and discussion, into five major areas, specifically:

• Community; a sense of being part of a community and of contributing to a community, including aspects such as altruism, ethical issues, globalisation and developing country benefits

• Quality; including quality of the software and of data, as well as stability, robustness, and persistence.

• Availability; including long-term access to data (not data becoming unavailable through lack of interoperability or of continuing migration), standards, persistence of applications.

• Costs; total cost of ownership, licensing costs, political costs

• Novelty; curiosity, fun, creativity, fit to needs, problem solving, creative development.

Following discussion and voting, participants rated the most important issues in rank order as:

1. Quality

2. Availability

3. Cost

4. Community

5. Novelty

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Executive Summary >>>

Appendices>>>

Status of this report >>>

Technical aspects, copyright and licensing; GNU Free Documentation License >>>

Copyright (c) 2004 IMIA Open Source Working Group and British Computer Society Health Informatics Committee

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