[nycbug-talk] interesting read

[Jay Savage]

On 5/22/05, alex at pilosoft.com <alex at pilosoft.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 22 May 2005, Jay Savage wrote:
> 
> > The pacemaker argument is a bit disingenuous, though.  The post was
> > about healthcare IT, and since the author is involved with jsyncmanager,
> > etc., I read that as infrastructure.  So the real question is: when you
> > walk into an emergency room and the workstations at the nurses station
> > are running Windows 95, does that give you a great feeling of
> > confidence?  When the screens above the station showing the EKG output
> > from various beds are XP desktops with consipcuous blank spots and
> > windows that say "this program has committed a sharing violation", is
> > that a good thing?  I've had both happen in the past six months, and the
> > answer in both cases is "no".  I don't want the workstation where the
> > doctor is looking at my medical records to suddenly display BSOD.  I
> > don't want it to have a kernel panic, either, but which is more likely?
> The above is hardly IT. I've made this point before: There's healthcare
> IT, which is no different from all other IT environments - and human lives
> do not depend on it. Open Source is just as applicable there as in any
> other IT environment.
> 
> What you've described above, particularly EKG output, *is* life-critical,
> as in, malfunction of software can result in death. There, I would say
> there is far less benefit of using open source software.
> 
> That's all.
> 
> -alex

If that's not IT, then what is?  I wasn't talking about the
software/firmware that runs EKGs and displays the output over the
patient's head; I was talking about the cabling, routing hardware and
software, etc., that gets that information to a remote monitoring
station--usually over some sort of standard tcp/ip network (usually
ethernet), and the OS and userland used to display that information at
the remote monitoring station.  Once the information is turned into
packets, comes out of a serial or ethernet port, and starts running
along cat5, coax, or fiber to a different part of the building, that
certainly fits my definition of IT, especially when the results are
delivered for local processing and display on a workstation running a
different OS than the machine that produced the original output.

I'd say, "regulating information exchange between workstations,
servers, and network appliances" was a pretty good start a a
definition of IT, if such a thing is even possible.

I can see where there's room for cunfusion, though:  This may be a
discussion where anecdotes and examples serve to cloud the issue
rather than clarify it.  So let's put it this way:  If the data can be
entrusted to any current Windows release, it can certainly be
entrusted to a *BSD, or possibly even Linux.  If current Windows
workstations were phased out in favor of opensource OS, there would be
a significant cost benefit, and probably a significant increase in the
stability of the infrastructure as a whole.

As for specific (client, user) applications, even if the current
proprietary closed-source solutions were redirected to other
platforms, that would result in advances in stability and
availability--even the simple, universal unix ability to update
applications without mucking about in the registry and probably
rebooting is a significant advantage in a high availability
environment.  It is difficult to believe, though, that with a proper
(structured, BSDish) design philosophy, that any development effort
would not benefit from the peer-review and constant refactoring of
opensource efforts.

Opensource projects have certainly proven themselves capapble of far
surpassing the stability and performance of proprietary solutions in
other venues, particularly mission-critical applications, why not
healthcare?  Why should I suddenly trust Windows and software designed
for it with my life when I don't even trust it them with my web and
mail servers?  That seems backwards.

Embedded systems, though, I agree, are a place where opensource
projects are of more dubious value.

--jay

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