Sun announced today that it will be distributing its Java 2 more widely than before.

“This whole KDE-Gnome war — it’s just plain silly,” Haarvard Nord, chief executive of Oslo-based Troll Tech, told CNet. He’d like to see a merger, but added, “It does not seem likely.” CNet’s
perspective piece tries to sort out the Gnome-KDE relationship.

SuSE Linux and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., global supplier of
integrated circuits for the personal and networked computer and communications markets, announced Tuesday that
SuSE will drive the Linux community’s work to port Linux to AMD’s new 64-bit architecture, x86-64. The x86-64 port
of Linux will run new 64-bit applications as well as currently existing 32-bit ix86 Linux applications. All this from Business Wire.

From the press release at LinuxPR: “The past few months have been incredibly difficult for us,” admits Jeff Carr, President of LinuxPPC Inc. “But now we’re in the process of putting things back together, making sure that things are working properly. Everything from our software, the distribution of that software, and the user experience will improve.” The company will “put tremendous effort into ensuring that its users are not only satisfied, but happy,” according to the release.

From the Business Wire release: “While the Bluepoint Linux currently sold in mainland China is in simplified Chinese, the version
of Bluepoint 2.0 for the Hong Kong market is in traditional Chinese.”

Looking for the Debian Weekly News newsletter? It highlights the 2.2 release and news from LinuxWorld.

From a CNet
report: “Linuxcare, Dell Computer and OpenSales have created a partnership to sell OpenSales’ e-commerce software on Dell computers, company executives said Tuesday. Dell will sell a server loaded with OpenSales’ e-commerce software, which lets people create and run shopping Web sites, bundled with support from Linuxcare. The product will be unveiled in the fourth quarter and will be called E-Shop-in-a-box.”
In a related story, OpenSales, an Open Source e-commerce applications company, and Linuxcare announced Tuesday that they have signed a comprehensive customer referral agreement designed to offer a range of enterprise services to hardware manufacturers and software vendors, reports Business Wire.

Business Wire has provided a recap of Tuesday’s major happenings.

The conference will be Sept. 11 to 15 in Albuquerque, N.M., according to a press release at LinuxPR.

By Grant Gross
Managing Editor
Ignacio Valdes wants to pull the medical industry into the Open Source community.

Valdes, a psychiatrist from Houston, Texas, believes an Open Source approach would reduce the reported millions of dollars health-care facilities seem to waste on IT projects. In March, he founded the Web site LinuxMedNews to spread the news about Open Source software projects being developed for medical use.

“I think I was meant to be the agent of change in medicine, and that’s what the whole site is about,” says Valdes, who worked in IT for 10 years before going to medical school. “I thought the way I could contribute now was to start a site that would unify the movement and be a cheerleader.”

Valdes had been aware of the Free Software movement when he was a computer science grad student in the late ’80s. As he moved into the medical arena, he noticed dozens of proprietary software companies competing with each other, often with wasteful results.

LinuxMedNews links to a report by Healthcare Informatics claiming that each health-care facility in the country spent between $5 million and $50 million on failed software systems during the 1990s.

“The closed source model wasn’t working, and it never had,” Valdes says. “No one [medical software] company has the engineering resources to complete a project and stay in business.”

Instead, when an Open Source medical software project fizzles out, “it’s not really a failure,” he adds. “Someone can pick the ball up and take it the next 10 yards.

“Open Source development is a very organic thing. It’ll react to changing conditions, which is essential in medicine.”

Range of medical projects

The potential for Open Source projects in medicine is virtually unlimited, Valdes says. Projects range from simple prescription-printing software to portable computers doctors can use to record patient charts, eliminating the often-illegible handwritten charts.

When Valdes began researching the need for his Web site, he found 17 Open Source projects related to medicine. The projects list on his site includes dental practice management software, a Palm OS drug database, and a project to assemble health-care records from Open Source XML components.

Valdes, known by his poker nickname “Saint” on the site, also tries to predict the future of medicine, in an article titled, Beyond This Horizon. He sees a time when Open Source projects will help first-year medical students treat simulated patients.

“By the time you’ve finished your first year, you’ve seen 3,000 patients, you’ve killed 50 of them, and you’ve been sued three times,” Valdes says about the future virtual patient software. “Medical school will be different then it is now, when you sit in a lecture hall for an entire year.”

Room for discussion

Valdes’ site, with the subtitle “Revolutionizing medical education and practice,” will look familiar to fans of popular Open Source news/discussion sites. LinuxMedNews includes room for discussion of every article, and Valdes has posted about 85 articles since late March.

Reader posts range from fan mail to, “Too much hyperbole. Stop hitting us over the head with your opinions.” The site is averaging 1,000 to 2,000 visitors a week, Valdes says, and reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.

“So far no one’s really challenged me on the validity of the idea, but I welcome that challenge,” he says. “At this point, I don’t think we’re a real threat to anybody. If someone harshly criticizes this idea, I’ll consider that a victory because that means we’re a threat.”

One frequent visitor is Tim Cook, project coordinator of the FreePM Project.

Cook, formerly a hospital information systems professional, says Valdes is providing an important service to the medical industry. “The open source medical informatics community is small but growing rapidly,” Cook adds. “Ignacio saves me time mining the Net for relevant articles.”

Cook says he frequents the site both for news links and for Valdes’ own articles. Oh, and it’s good for Cook’s ego: LinuxMedNews “occasionally mentions my Open Source project,” he jokes.

Valdes hopes the site will start reaching medical-school students “because they’re not crusty in their ways.”

“The old guys don’t get it,” he says. “Medicine changes very slowly. It’s going to be a very uphill battle for the next 10 years.”