The Virtues of PatientOS

It used to be a truism that the open source development methodology would only work for mainstream projects. Only for areas of interest to large user and hacker populations, so the logic went, could support the free software ecology. So a striking proof of the growing maturity of open source is its increasing appearance in vertical markets, hitherto regarded as unviable.

For example, here's the GPL'd PatientOS:

PatientOS is a free clinical information management system for hospitals and healthcare practitioners. Pharmacy, the laboratory, registration and other departments will be able to automate many processes when version 1.0 is released October 31st, 2008. A physician practice version will be released March 31st, 2008.

Pretty specialist - and pretty important, too. (Via FSDaily.)

Going Beyond: Ultra VioLet Composer

One of the common criticisms of the open source development methodology is that it only works for a limited class of software, namely those with big constituencies. According to this view, there are unlikely to be successful open source projects for niche sectors.

That may have been true in the early days of free software, but now that the number of developers who are prepared to get involved has grown, the overall scaling means that more such niches can be addressed.

A good example is VioLet Composer:

A modular multispace desktop music composer for Win32 (source available for porting). Features realtime wavelet processing, flexible arrangement, extensible sample types, autosaving and much, much more. Now with support for simple Buzz effects.

Great fun.

Second Life Comes to...Brighton?

Brighton is famous for many things, but cutting edge virtual world software development is not one of them. Until now:

Title: Software Developer
Department: Engineering
Work Location: San Francisco, Mountain View, Davis, Seattle or Brighton, UK