Linux Medical News

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Linux Medical News [1] is a popular website publication that is exclusively devoted to news of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) such as GNU/Linux and the numerous clinical computing and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software projects in existence.

1 History
2 Technology
3 Significance
4 See also

[edit] History

Founded in March of 2000 the sites mission is to "facilitate, amplify and begin the process of fundamentally changing medical education and practice into a more effective, fair and humane enterprise using modern technologies." In its first week, the site had 300 visitors and has steadily grown to over 30,000 visitors per week at the time of this writing. The inspiration for the site came from the realities of medicine and the ideas and licenses of the Free Software Foundation [2], and the Open Source [3] movement. The community that Linux Medical News serves believe that FOSS in medicine may hold the answer to many of the difficulties of creating and supporting health informatics software.

[edit] Technology

The site uses the Zope platform and the somewhat dated Squishdot [4] product news site software. Both are based on the Python programming language. All article URL's are permanent since its inception.

[edit] Significance

Also known as LinuxMedNews, the site is the largest repository of news and information on Free and Open Source Software in medicine. It also discusses Health Informatics in general. Over 1200 postings and articles have been published to date. It has chronicled and continues to report on the rise of the Free and Open Source Software in medicine industry. The industry has grown from many concept-type projects in development to the current environment in which many projects are now in actual production at multiple locations with service contracts and support available. Linux Medical News has become a self-sustaining, community website and will continue to report on FOSS in medicine for the foreseeable future.