A letter to Obama

An interesting data point in the electronic medical records discussion.

Those (admittedly few) primary care practices which choose not to interact with the insurance companies, and operate on a cash basis, also happen to be the ones who are pushing through higher efficiencies through technology. Hello Health (https://www.hellohealth.com/), in Brooklyn, uses and develops a medical web platform through its software arm, Myca. Qliance (http://qliance.com/), in Seattle, has been using an electronic records system from the start, which was described to me as "just a glorified CMS".

It does seem strange that paper is the word of the insurance world, and I don't know the industry well enough to explain the problem, but it seems the problem may have something to do with the doctor-insurer dynamic.

Lame. Dziuba could probably give a fuck about advertisers in The Register. That he clearly doesn't give a fuck about writing anything but linkbait is the real critique of this article.

It will rot until someone needs it. Isn't this a beautiful form of preserving investment and pooling resources across barriers of time?

I've found that marketing is vastly overrated. I think people think it's important because Ruby on Rails came out of nowhere and had good marketing, but that was just a rare special case. Most of the time, people will find your open source project and start using it without fancy marketing.

An example of this is the Perl OO library, Moose. It started out as some code factored out of our internal apps. Other people liked it and contributed code. Now it's the standard way to do OO in Perl. The only marketing that was done was talking about it on IRC and doing some conference talks. And oh yeah, the awesome single-page website (http://www.iinteractive.com/moose/).

It's sort of ironic that they're using blogger to publish this, which of course isn't open source...

You've never heard of Ingres?

But anyway, yeah. It's hard to find time for both coding and writing letters (that will be ignored) to the President. A classic example here is ESR -- he spends a lot of time advocating open source, but doesn't spend much time writing software. (OK, OK, he wrote vc-mode.el and maintains fetchmail. Even I do more than that!)

The free software movement doesn't need you to write letters. The free software movement needs you to write excellent free software. The rest follows naturally.