[Gnumed-devel] support options for medical practices using GNUmed

[J Busser]

A few doctors from various parts of Canada have gotten in touch to 
ponder how to solve the dilemma wherein doctor groups may say

        "Open Source - it may be fine, but *who* will support it?"

One group was looking at getting GNUmed further developed, and to 
establish a company to provide local support. Right now, they are 
"frozen", because commercial vendors have been able to destabilize 
the process, with warnings that the group's Executive would be 
"crazy" and other fear mongering.

But anyway in the discussion it was suggested to me that any of IBM, 
Unisys, Novell, Sierra Systems might be interested both in helping to 
support Canadian doctors using GNUmed with whatever other additional 
development would be required. Their interest would presumably be in 
proportion to the size of the potential market for their services.

One question that I have is whether one of these companies -- 
supposing Novell -- prefers users to run their preferred distro -- 
like SuSE --- would we have to be concerned that they would seek to 
build into the code dependencies on a commercial version of "their" 
distro or am I worrying unnecessarily assuming we can require an 
unforked GNUmed to remain multi-os compatible (therefore it would 
have to be kept multi-distro compatible).

Or do people think it would be better for a medical association or 
group to create a company to provide local support? The advantage 
would be control. But would a big disadvantage be that even if you 
hired smart people who understood the business of IT, you would be 
challenged to "grow" (scale) the support as hopefully more doctors 
start to use GNUmed?

Also, some people in my area are running OSCAR. Would it make sense 
to try to develop a support system (group/company) that supports more 
than one Open Source software, or does *that* sound inadvisable?