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Open source now has an established presence in the Australian market and shows significant opportunity for further growth. As recognized in the recently published Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report, when it comes to open source, the continent is also a key center of innovation and world leadership.
The report was compiled by Waugh Partners based on research carried out in late 2007 and it recognizes the many ways that Australia has made its mark on the numerous facets of open source – industry, community, education and skills, careers and employment, innovation, the market and business development.
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Last week, iHealthBeat posted an 8 minute audio interview discussing the recently announced Open Health Tools consortium. Open source and healthcare has the potential to change the current healthcare IT landscape, enabling healthcare IT vendors to focus on what truly differentiates systems instead of forcing them to invest in developing basic infrastructure. Collaboratively, OHT will focus on developing free, open source healthcare IT infrastructure for use by anyone.
An interesting new report — “The Role of Linux Servers and Commercial Workloads” — sponsored by The Linux Foundation and published by IDC, provides some impressive facts and opinions about the health of the Linux server market.
Quoting from the Summary: “Spending on software related to Linux SOE [Server Operating Environment] platforms is growing quickly - with a 2006-2011 CAGR of 35.7%. Overall spending on Linux SOEs, including software, hardware, and services, is increasing at a 2006-2011 CAGR of 24.1%.”
The report goes beyond the standard operating system view by including data on application deployments and breakdowns of Linux usage by vertical market. It also offers IDC’s views of Challenges and Opportunities facing the Linux SOE market today.
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Red Hat is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Open Health Tools (OHT) open source community. OHT is working closely with a broad spectrum of healthcare groups, including: major national healthcare providers in areas such as Canada, Australia and the UK; healthcare standards groups like IHTSDO and HL7; healthcare policy groups such as HSSP; and software providers such as Red Hat. OHT’s ultimate goal is to collaboratively build software tooling that will enable the seamless electronic exchange of healthcare data. This is an ambitious goal, but with incremental steps, we think it can be achieved.
The first OHT project is the HL7 tooling project, which will take some of today’s HL7 tooling to the next level.
We are tremendously excited about the potential enhancements that open source can provide to the healthcare industry. Semantic interoperability is a huge challenge, and we believe the only way that we can achieve this goal is through a collaborative, open source development model that brings together all stakeholders.
Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD). Celebrated for the first time, it’s a global day for document liberation. According to the website, “it will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.” Red Hat is celebrating the day through awareness activities and use of the created DFD artwork, and we’ve publicly expressed our own support of open standards.
As the March 29th deadline for ISO’s OOXML vote draws closer, it’s a time for FLOSS advocates to show their support of open standards. When talking about document standards, the greatest interoperability is achieved by having one standard to which all vendors adhere. Some proprietary companies argue that having one standard stifles innovation, but we don’t think that’s true because complying with a standard does not preclude developers from creating multiple formats in which to create, save and exchange documents. Having an open document standard simply means that text documents, spreadsheets and presentations that users create and exchange can be opened by the software program of their choice.
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Health IT has tremendous potential in addressing the major challenges we face in healthcare: improving patient safety and quality of care and managing costs while improving efficiency.
One of the most visible challenges that health IT faces is the question of protecting privacy. If patient privacy cannot be protected, patients will not trust a system with accurate, complete medical information, rendering the system useless.
Properly designed, greater adoption of health IT offers the potential to improve patient privacy. For example, electronic records enable patients to selectively give access to parts of their medical record to specific individuals. Electronic records can also audit access to medical records. Neither of these are practical with paper records.
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If you’re curious about what might be included in the next version of Fedora — Fedora 9 Sulphur, due out in late April 2008 — today’s Beta release gives a good glimpse into what’s ahead. The Beta release signals the feature freeze for the next release, meaning that all major features that we plan to include have to either be complete or in a testable state. It’s aimed at our developers and early adopters, but everyone in the community is given the opportunity to give feedback to improve our latest and greatest cycles. Testing of the Fedora 9 Beta release is really simple because with live media images, you don’t need to install anything.
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On Tuesday, March 11, Red Hat released the Beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. The Beta is expected to last approximately two months, with the final, supported update appearing soon after. During the Beta, Red Hat’s QA group, partners and customers will put the update through extensive testing for hardware support, feature enhancements and correct application operation to ensure that the final update is as solid as possible.
It is worth noting that although the Linux kernel is still 2.6-based, the number of enhancements between 2.6.0 and 2.6.24 (the latest version) are probably as extensive as between previous major releases, such as 2.2 to 2.4 or 2.4 to 2.6. This is because the 2.6 incremental development model is working very well, so that enhancements get merged upstream in manageable amounts. Who knows, perhaps the days of the “big new kernel release” are behind us, something that is a credit to the quality of the Linux kernel and the open source development model.
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As the March 29th voting deadline on OOXML approaches, Red Hat has announced its support of Open Document Format (ODF) instead of Office Open XML (OOXML). The Company released its official position statement on OOXML on Wednesday, March 5, 2008. The statement, hosted on Red Hat’s new Open Standards website, cites the desire for interoperability and the inadequacy of review as the Company’s primary reasons for opposing OOXML.
Red Hat supports ODF, an existing ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard, which was openly reviewed and developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for nearly three years before it was submitted to ISO for approval. In contrast, ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association, reviewed OOXML for only one year before it sought ISO standardization. Despite the short review period, ECMA produced over 6,000 pages of documentation for OOXML, compared to the 700 pages of ODF.
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InfoWorld is presenting the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, CA from March 25-26, and we’re sending Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to keynote on true innovation in open source – see him speak from 9-9:30a.m. PT in the Gold Ballroom at The Palace Hotel. As a Platinum sponsor, Red Hat will also have have a tabletop booth in the exhibit area. Come hear how we’re changing the face of the open source industry.
We’re also sponsoring this year’s EclipseCon event in Santa Clara, CA from March 17-20. Join us at our booths to see demos of JBoss Developer Studio, or attend our session to hear more about the benefits of JBoss solutions. Find us in booths 216 and 217 at the ARAMARK Convention Center.
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