Licence change derails development of hospital system

The changing of the licence of openERP, an open source solution for enterprise resource planning, from GPL to AGPL in late 2009, thwarted development of Hospital, a hospital information system (HIS) written for a paediatric clinic in Thessaloniki (Greece). The clinic stopped a pilot of the software, and its developers moved to other open source-based projects.

The HIS was being developed for the 1st Pediatric Clinic of the Ippokrateio General Hospital of Thessaloniki. The software could create growth charts, display genealogy trees and let medical professionals view the medical history.

In the summer of 2010, the clinic had just begun testing the Hospital Information System. The group was about to present the project to the Greek government, hoping to convince them to promote its use in other hospitals and clinics.

However, the openERP licence change disrupted development, according to one of the programmers who at the time worked on the software. Several of the key modules for Hospital HIS stopped being supported, others moved to Tryton, which started as a openERP fork in late 2008.

Metamorphose

OpenERP started as an open source project in 2005, with the software published under the GNU General Public License. The project changed the licence to the GNU Affero General Public License in 2009. In May last year, the eponymous firm developing the solution changed its name to Odoo. In February this year, the company announced it would once more change the licence, aiming to republish the code using the GNU Lesser General Public License. The company hopes the new licence will attract freelancers and software publishers.

The code for the now orphaned Hospital project is still available for download. The code can be found in the collection of reusable ICT solutions aggregated on the EC’s Joinup project.

More information:

Hospital (HIS) on Joinup