[new] Koha for libraries and ??? for ABA and ??? for HMOs

Dear LWN readers,
 
I recently posted this to gnu-friend.org in response to a <a
href="http://lwn.net/Articles/9255/">link</a> that I followed from LWN
and thought that a wider audience might be more appropriate. The
following is my comment:
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This is an awesome thing to do. I'm glad that a single library took the
plunge but it might have been easier and cheaper for a number of them to
invest together.
 
What would be cool is if the American Bar Association, a hugh consumer
of office software, were to spearhead the development of a free software
word processor. They could start with Abiword or one of the many other
packages available. they could then fund the addition of features like
citing legal information, legal templates, a spell checker that
understood the latin terms that are used in legal briefs, etc.. If this
took off then most legal firms (not that they are my favorite entities
in the world) could save millions of dollars on office packages. Further
all of the legal papers that get filed are in the public domain (unless
a judge seals them) so why not use a public format for the documents so
that the public can truly access them. This would certainly make it
easier for non-laywers to get information that they may need.
 
This idea could also be used for the entire health care industry. If
congress wanted to cut costs in the health care industry imagine how far
they could go by making the forms standardized for all parts of the
industry. Insurance should like this as well. If the entire industry
used the same software then all of the documents would be in the same
format - both from the disk storage point of view and from the page
layout point of view. This would make it easier for anyone in the
industry to process information since common fields would always be in
the same place in the document. Everyone in the industry would have
access to the software for free and could thus save millions. The
documents could be exchanged between pharmacies, hospitals, doctors,
patients, insurance companies, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
without the need to reformat or re-enter the information. There are
literally thousands of different forms that are required by different
insurance carriers and all but one could be eliminated.
 
These are just two examples where free software could benefit entire
industries. Both of these projects are too big to be taken on by a
single lawyer or doctor but the Bar Association is big enough to handle
the leagl word processor and any of the government agencies that I
mentioned could take care of the medical one. Further the government is
large enough that if they mandated that all reports that are submitted
to them be in the new format that everyone else would just kinda fall in
line.
 
The real place that Free Software would be of value is if it simply
eliminated the need for proprietary software in most of the industries
that don't really need it. Obviously I'm not advocating running a
radiation machine on Free Software but the reports that it generates
could certainly be in a common format. Almost all industries could start
to develope their own software: Banking, Investment Houses, Accountants,
etc.. Some software could be used across many industries. Take
scheduling for example: you make appointments at the doctor's office
just like you do to get your hair cut. I think that there would be a
business model in a software development company getting a bunch of
companies from the same industry together and say "Software is an
expense to you. For some upfront money now we can eliminate a large
portion of you software spending in the future." Companies that do not
write software to sell but to run their business on do not compete with
their software (for the most part) so why not level that part of their
playing field so that they can focus their energies in areas where they
do compete.
 
Construction companies and architects are another one that comes to
mind. Let them compete on the price and style of the homes that they
build and eliminate the cost of software. There are many programming
libraries that will run equally well on Winblows as they will on Linux.
We can't expect them to ditch what they are familiar with until we can
prove that everything that they need to run their business will run on a
free OS: GNU/Linux
 
Best Regards,
 
Tres Melton
class5 (at) pacbell.net