Switzer used to work for Unanimis Consulting, a large ad space agency based in the United Kingdom. Today, he does work for them through Openads. Unanimis, Switzer says, is very much like Federated Media. It represents publishers such as eBay, Ticketmasters, and the BBC, selling Internet ad inventory on their behalf. “[At Unanimis] we realized a lot of our profits were going toward the ad-serving technology, so we decided to use an open source ad server to save money,” Switzer says. “Over the next two to three years, I made significant changes and improvements to phpAdsNew, and became the leader of that project,” while still working full time for Unanimis.

Switzer says that because he was working for Unanimis, most of the changes to phpAdsNew at that time were “solely for the benefit of Unanimis, without taking much consideration for what the community wanted.” He had a sneaking suspicion the community was much larger than just Unanimis users, so Switzer set out to prove it. “I wrote a script for Google to find out how many people had our tags on their files. It was over 100,000 domains serving hundreds of billions of ads a month. It was obvious that phpAdsNew (now known as Openads) was the biggest ad server network on the Internet.” With a community that big, Switzer reasoned, it needed to have a company backing the product up, rather than “this guy here and that guy there.” His entrepreneurial spirit jumped at the chance to create that company. Switzer soon left Unanimis in order to focus completely on expanding and monetizing the Openads project.

“The goal for Openads is to provide a platform for advertisers to be able to buy ads on publishers’ sites,” he says. “We’re taking the large community of publishers who have our software loaded, and creating ways for them to make it easy to get ads on their site. If you have a small site, you’d probably just get Google Adsense. Over time, after you start making more money, you’d probably add Tribal Fusion and any number of other ad products. Then you’d rotate them to see which gave you the most profits. As the site grows, you’d also get solicitations from advertisers who want to advertise directly on the site. That’s good, but it’s also getting more complex — which is really a barrier to entry into making real revenue. So we’re building a publisher platform that makes it easy for advertisers to click on a link, upload their ad creative, and pay automatically. We’re also making it easier for publishers to try out a number of different networks, to automatically rotate them and bubble up the network that pays the most.”

Openads derives its income from advertisers who pay for access to the ad space inventory, and from publishers who pay yearly fees for technical support, consulting, bespoke training, and custom coding, though that is on a limited basis, Switzer says, until the project can “build a community of developers that can help us out in that area.”

The biggest challenge in monetizing a large open source project has been meeting the needs of the community, Switzer says — “Trying to put together a structure so that they can have a voice, so I can really get new product ideas and direction for Openads to come directly from the community. I wouldn’t say they have been ignored, but there hasn’t been that structure. So, over the last six months we’ve spent a lot of time serving people — we’ve dedicated resources to reading forum messages and responding by building up the infrastructure, consulting with publishers, and getting venture capital investment to help with that.”

Landing $5 million in venture capital this past June has changed Openads “quite a bit,” Switzer says. “Before we had it, it was largely just me and a few developers, and so we would sit there and develop whatever we decided to and there wasn’t a lot of significant project planning going on.” Switzer says Openads purposefully chose Index Ventures to provide the majority of the funding, because “they specialize in open source and community-based products. We were very selective in who was going to give us money because the potential for taking a special project like this and overcommercializing it is there — but Index absolutely gets it. They know the value of using community to help drive forward the company.”

As part of the financing deal, Openads recruited Skype vice president James Bilefield to fill the CEO spot. “We were introduced to James by one of the investors,” Switzer says. “He’s somebody who really gets the Internet space. He absolutely got it. He really knows the value of community, and he has strong operations and management skills. It was a pretty obvious thing to bring him aboard. And by the time we were looking for a CEO I’d already known him for seven or eight months, and there was a level of trust.”

Switzer says listening to the community is the most important aspect of commercializing an open source project. “Take advice and direction from them in terms of new product features and even strategically positioning your company. We’ve not yet fully monetized Openads, and we’ve even ruled out some commercial options, because we spent a long time making sure all the features the community wanted were there. Monetizing an open source project is still an art, and there are people that understand the value of community and they understand the fact that when you’re the leader of a great project, that’s something incredibly special. Surround yourself with people who understand that from an investment perspective, and from a coworker perspective.”

POS System – MerchantOS is based on open source software. It’s web based, easy to use and affordable. At MerchantOS they make retail software easy.

Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software. “Having deployed [Linux servers] to our customers, we turned around and said, we can do the same thing internally and save bunches of money. We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux — although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,” Christian says. “It’s to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.”

CEO Rick Puckette is enthusiastic about the change. “When we were using Microsoft, we had a lot more than 15 servers,” he says. “We had upwards of 50 or 60 that were becoming difficult to manage. So as part of this open source initiative, we also chose a virtual machine called Xen, which allows us to put multiple machines on one physical server, to consolidate.” Puckette says that Mindbridge evaluated other virtual machine software, including VMware, but Xen was “very cost-efficient and pretty bulletproof. We also use Hyperic to monitor the health and happiness of the servers,” he says.

Even though Mindbridge now delivers its security monitoring solutions mostly on a Linux platform, some customers still want Microsoft. “We’re willing to accommodate them, for a price,” Christian says. “It costs us significantly more to support a Windows box than a Linux box. It’s almost like Microsoft is now an afterthought.”

The transition to open source has had its share of challenges, Christian and Puckette say, but nothing that they couldn’t overcome. For Christian, the biggest deal was sysadmins who had to learn Linux. “It’s people’s learning curves, no doubt,” he says. “They had only ever administered Microsoft boxes in the past, and had to get used to the idea of command lines. The interesting thing is that a number of our developers came from strong Linux or BSD backgrounds, and they helped the sysadmin people make the transition.” To aid the process, Christian looked specifically for new hires who were eager to learn. “The people I like are pretty inquisitive type people. I tried to filter out the others in the interview process.”

Puckette says it takes some extra time to get an open source infrastructure configured the right way. “The challenge as opposed to buying solutions from one vendor is that when you buy from Microsoft, you can assume it works with other Microsoft products. With open source you have to take more time to make sure all the products interact and all the pieces fit together. But the cost benefits clearly outweigh going with all Microsoft.”

Christian likes the flexibility of open source. “We always find that at the end of the day, when we hit a problem, there was almost always a configuration file you could tweak and make it work the way you want it to work. The management of the systems, the flexibility in the vendors — even within our infrastructure we have three Linux vendors. We pick and choose based on the best tool for the job.”

Mindbridge has also transitioned its development environment. “We use it for all our development of new services that we sell to our customers,” Puckette says. “We bring in as much open source software as possible, and we integrate that software to solve business problems, get to market faster, and focus more on our customers.” Puckette likes the fact that the development community is self-motivated enough to continuously update open source software applications. “I don’t have to fund new features.”

Christian appreciates the benefits of the open source community too. “You get your problems solved easier,” he says. “You put out an email to a user mailing list, and you may get a response from the developer. Try doing that with most commercial vendors. It’s hard to get access to those people. In the open source world, it’s relatively easy.”

For other companies that might be considering a switch from a proprietary foundation to an open source one, Christian has some advice. “Choose a small project and don’t try to flip your infrastructure all at once. Choose something with a high probability of success,” like a Web-based application, “and go for that first. What you’ll be doing is allowing people to learn about the operating system and how to hook that operating system into your existing infrastructure — for example, hooking Linux into your Active Directory structure.”

Puckette says choose something “non-mission critical” to start with. “Put your toe in, pick an application that, if it does go down, the CEO won’t scream about it. Get smart about that one, then take on a mission-critical. Once you cut it over, you’re not paying the big guys.”

We women make up more than half the population, so by no means are we a minority. Yet we claim a minority status of sorts in the IT world, where depending on who you talk to, women make up somewhere from 20% to 30% of the workforce. This topic is the focus of many heated discussions on Internet mailing lists frequented by women in IT. Many believe the low number of females in computer science occupations is a problem that needs to be fixed. Girls, they say, are being actively discouraged by parents, peers, and teachers from entering fields considered by society to be too “geeky” for women.

If you listen to these pundits, you may begin to believe that girls are champing at the bit to become technologists, but are being forced to instead enter fields like sociology, health care, or services. Some are even being handcuffed to the kitchen sink and forced to become stay-at-home mothers, the worst possible punishment of all, because everyone knows that no one in her right mind would ever want to do anything as subservient and unrewarding as raising a brood of unruly children to be the next generation of leaders. All these poor girls want is to be just like men: aggressive, logical, and task-oriented, and we’re forcing them to go against their nature and be nurturing, emotional, and relationship-oriented. It’s a crime. But I digress.

Assuming that the relative paucity of women in the IT industry is a problem that needs fixing, is creating a new “Girls’ Linux Distribution” going to help? I say no. If we want to become part of the industry, why would we want to separate ourselves and draw attention to our differences? If we’re trying to say that women have all the same aptitudes and tendencies that men in IT have, it makes no sense to then say that we need or want our own flavor of Linux.

What would we include in this distro? Pink butterfly themes? Shopping calculators? Does that sound insulting? It should. So I ask again, what exactly would we include in a female version of Linux? The longer you think about this, the more ridiculous it sounds. In fact, if you believe that there are men out there who really do want to keep women out, it sounds like an idea that misogynists would push just to keep us separate. “Aw, look at those cute little girls playing at technology — they even made their own Starbucks icons!” I can hear it now.

Some say that the reason for a women’s distribution would be to give women the opportunity to work on creating a custom version of Linux. This insinuates, again, that women are being excluded from participating in development of other distributions — that there are hundreds of women out there who would be madly coding away if only they were allowed to, if only someone would hold the gate open for them, if only someone would invite them to participate in the creation of a girly GUI. That otherwise, they’re just too scared and shy, and incapable of jumping in there with the boys.

The fact is that most women I know outside of the IT industry are more tech-savvy than the men in their lives. They are the ones who have embraced the Internet and the gadgets that accompany it. They are the ones who communicate mostly by email, and their husbands and boyfriends and fathers and brothers are still stuck on the phone and can’t boot the computer without someone holding their hand. According to Nielsen, women make up the majority of Internet users, and they spend a lot more money on technology than men do. Just because most of them do not choose to make a living at it doesn’t mean that women are somehow lacking in the ability to understand and absorb the concept of technology.

Creating a special Linux distribution as though it were a delightful surprise that we can use Linux at all is not going to help our image. Special Linuxes are for people with USB keys and religious sensibilities. We women are doing just fine, thanks.

Wooster says he is passionate about human expansion into space. He’s a real rocket scientist, but he wants to erase some of the mystique surrounding that moniker. “Rocket science is seen as a very elite profession,” Wooster says, “but there are a lot of things needed in order to have a human base on Mars that can be done without a lot of rocket science itself.” He wants to open up opportunities for people in other professions to share what they know. “I feel there’s a large set of people who would work on these things if they had an opportunity.”

Before 1995, Wooster didn’t even know what Linux was, let alone open source software, but during his recent tenure as a research scientist at MIT, the concepts “gradually worked their way into my consciousness,” he says. “The thing that struck me was I noticed there were a lot of people who were very motivated about space — computer programmers, car designers, and even just high school kids. I realized that the open source model is a good way of contributing to it.”

Wooster says the community’s core group of about 15 people bring an aerospace background to the mix, “who know how to design spacecraft, but half of them don’t even know what PHP is. Right now we are looking for people who have a good understanding of the Web side of things.” Wooster is working on a hosting infrastructure he says is similar to SourceForge.net — a repository for specifications, drawings, documentation, and software — in addition to a wiki where participants can share and discuss information.

“We’re focused on building up the technical foundations of human activities in space, identifying the current barriers to those activities, and then coming up with engineered solutions to those barriers — but doing so in an open source manner. If, for example, I design a solar-powered system for use on Mars and do some testing in the lab, rather than just writing up a paper and publishing it in a journal or a .PDF format where it’s difficult to extract information, I would post all of the CAD files and the more detailed engineering analyses so someone else can come along and improve on my design — they don’t have to start from scratch. Over time, what will happen is that more and more people will get involved in these actitivies and we will make technical progress toward lowering the barriers to entry for someone who wants to set up a human base on Mars, or an orbiting outpost. I don’t actually see the group in the near term doing those types of things. This is much more of laying the foundations.”

Wooster says the group is flexible about the kinds of projects that it will host on DevelopSpace. “What I see happening is an organic growth, of sorts,” he says. “As long as the projects are related to space, people can come along with their own projects.” DevelopSpace is about providing a pre-established infrastructure for projects so that researchers not employed by large aerospace companies with existing labs and prototypes don’t have to constantly start from scratch. “It’s a lot easier for someone to start a new project and make progress on the real question at hand” with the proper tools already in place, Wooster says, such as plans for hardware design, circuit board layouts, drawings for life support modules, and structural analysis datasets.

Wooster doesn’t expect much help from aerospace companies, whose profits are based in closely held technologies. “I don’t see that many of the existing aerospace companies would want to embrace this to begin with,” he says. “It’s lowering the barriers to entry to their business and encourages new entrants.” But government agencies like NASA may show interest. “They’re more likely to come around earlier on, I would say. They don’t have to worry as much about competitors — and in many ways this thing could help them leverage the resources they do have to accomplish more. But the area I really see as the first growth area is people in universities — there’s a group of people who are supposed to be publishing their activities. And then there’s the general public.”

If you’re interested in contributing your skills to the DevelopSpace project, visit the site and sign up.

The faithful are more inclined to think that the function of the LUG is changing from that of an incubator for Linux newbies to a social gathering for like minds. Others say that even though fewer people attend LUG meetings, it doesn’t change the fact that the LUG is an indispensable help in an environment where traditional support is often hard to come by.

A few years ago, LUGs enjoyed a heady heyday. If you were lucky enough to have a LUG close enough to drive to, you probably attended meetings regularly. Enthusiasm, both for Linux and the ideals for which it stands, drove an agenda full of exciting presentations, nights dedicated to getting a new distribution installed on your desktop, and lots of free stuff from companies like Red Hat, Corel, and SUSE, who wanted us to catch the fever.

Today, many LUGs have seen a slowdown in attendance, and some Linux events typically sponsored by local user groups have ceased to exist, such as the Atlanta Linux Showcase (ALS). Chris Farris, one of the founders of ALS and a sponsor of the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts group, says the quality of ALE has dropped “since the dot-com-bust period of 2001-2003. For me, part of the drop-off had to do with shutting down ALS, which was a driver for a lot of my participation in the Linux community.” Farris says that ALE has split into three groups to help members avoid Atlanta traffic jams: Central, Northeast, and Northwest. “Northwest has been on and off,” he says. “Northeast has a small group of people who attend — under 10. Central still gets decent turnout, but nothing like we saw back in 1995-1998 at Georgia Tech, where we could fill a 100-person room.”

Brad Spry, the contact person for the UNC Charlotte Linux Users Group, says attendance at that LUG is down, “but the reasons are not cut and dry.” He says that because the LUG is university-based, it’s hard to find a meeting time that works. Because of that, Spry says the most valuable asset for his group is the listserv. “Email isn’t burdened by time. People can participate whenever they have a chance. It’s a busy world.”

Vernard Martin of ALE agrees. “While [ALE] has broken into several groups, the overall mailing list hasn’t fragmented yet, and has many more people subscribed than actually attend all the meetings combined.” He says that the communication that mailing lists provide shows that the LUGs still are “quite useful.”

The Suncoast Area Linux User Group (SLUG), based in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, had splinter groups in at least three different counties in busier days. Now, SLUG is contracting. President Paul Foster says, “This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t know that you have to repair LUGs because their attendance is down. Times change, the market changes, conditions change.” But Foster doesn’t agree that attendees aren’t willing to drive miles to a meeting. “Gas isn’t that expensive yet,” he says. “If people don’t come, then there’s obviously nothing compelling enough to get them there.

“The height of SLUG was the Tampa meetings at Price Waterhouse Cooper [office building]. We had a large room, fast Internet access, and power at each table. Lots of tech talk, lots of questions answered. We had 35-40 per meeting.” When the group could no longer provide Internet access and power outlets, meeting attendance dropped, Foster says. “We dropped down to maybe 20, and I don’t know what it is now.

“I’ve lost a lot of my enthusiasm for Linux,” Foster says. “Here’s what I mean by that: when I first got involved, I was stoked. Windows sucked, and here was something I could tinker with. I could write programs with the free compiler, and everything was fairly transparent. At that time, Linux was not exactly the easiest thing to figure out, though. Installs required a lot of information I didn’t know and didn’t have to supply to Windows. Fast forward 10 years — I still use Linux almost exclusively and with no regrets. But now, I know most of what I need to know to do anything I need to do. Installs don’t require me to know much, the software mostly figures out my hardware. I love Linux. I’m just not excited about it. It’s like buying a new car. It’s cool-looking. It smells like a new car. A few months go by. You still like your car. But it’s now just your car. It’s what gets you from point A to point B. You don’t think much about it.”

Not dead yet

Though the trend may be down, some LUGs are still going strong. According to member Jeff Waugh, the monthly meetings of Sydney’s SLUG still pull in “60-100,” with an active mailing list and a strong presence in the business community. The Linux Users Group in Princeton, NJ, LUG/IP, is still growing, says member Brian Jones. “We’re seeing more people who are brand new to Linux, and also more people who are generally new computer users who are looking to buy a PC but want to know about Linux.”
Social networking

Foster says the conversation at LUG meetings doesn’t focus heavily on Linux anymore. “In general, the discussion ranges from home remodeling to wives, to Verizon and other evil corporations. I make sure we touch on Linux at least once a meeting, but that discussion usually lasts for about 10 minutes. The guys who come are not newbies. They are engineering types or networking types who work with computers daily. We don’t do presentations, but welcome anyone who wants to bring a box and have us hack away at it.”

For some long-time Linux people, a social gathering is the ideal scenario. “LUGs provide other things that don’t get obsolete, notably a social context,” says Chris Browne, a “troublemaker/shooter” for the GTALUG in Toronto. “To hobbyists or enthusiasts, much of the point is to get together with other enthusiasts. The point is to meet socially with a group of like-minded people.”

SLUG member Dylan Hardison says his sole interest in LUGs “has always been social. I don’t think presentations, the promise of new knowledge, or free stuff has ever been a consideration. All of my geographically close friends I have met via SLUG. I also met my fianc&eacture;e at a meeting. Pretty much every job I’ve ever had has been somehow related to SLUG or someone I’ve met through SLUG.”

Jeff Waugh, a member of the Sydney, Australia, SLUG, agrees that the social aspect is valuable. “[It] is still important to the organic, high-value growth of the userbase, mingling of ideas, and opportunity for business connections.” It’s possible that the “social LUG thing” ends up being the default mode once all the excitement has died down.

“Our LUG doesn’t do a whole lot,” says longtime Tampa SLUG member Russell Hires. “We don’t really have a cool Web site. We don’t have presentations that often, that I’m aware of. I did one or two myself, but I admit I didn’t do a great job. We’ve done a few things in the past, but nothing really lately. We seem to have expertise, but no one with energy and experience and ability invests a whole lot in our LUG. I feel like we all wait for someone else to do something.”

Spry says he’s trying to spur more interest. “One trial balloon I floated recently was a merger between Linux and Mac user groups. I feel they have a lot in common now, and would be a stronger group together. Both groups seemed to warm to the idea, but it has gone nowhere. Apathy reigns supreme. It seems as if advocacy has become cliché.”

Some see the decline in interest as more of a shift in focus from the operating system to the applications that run on it — “showing applications, showing concepts, planting the seed of an idea for what someone who has just recently installed Linux can do,” says Gareth Greenaway, president of Simi Conejo Linux Users Group. Greenaway says the Simi LUG has seen lower numbers over the last several years, “mostly due to the lack of interesting topics at the meetings.” Farris says that ALE’s topics have “almost always been about an application that runs on Linux: Asterisk, MythTV, dosemu, Exchange replacements, TiVo.”

“I’ve never seen a LUG that was kernel-centric, they were always application centric,” says Terry Collins, a computer hardware consultant based in Australia.

Whatever LUGs are for, and wherever they are headed, no one really wants them to go away. “We still need LUGs,” Farris says. “They provide a place for professionals, students, and hobbyists to meet, discuss and network.”

Foster sums it up. “You’ve got a group of people who are generally extraordinary. They’re fairly knowledgeable about a pretty technical field. They’re generally courteous and good-humored and willing to help, for free. While we don’t all attend barbecues at each other’s houses, and we may not agree on politics or religion, we still can count on each other more or less as friends. That’s not a bad reason to have a group together.”

SimpleCenter gets shipped with some digital audio receiver products, such as the Motorola simplefi, and it is also downloadable from SimpleCenter.com. SimpleCenter was originally produced by SimpleDevices, which UEI acquired in 2004 as part of its product line expansion. UEI offers a premium version of SimpleCenter for $30 with a proprietary license; it features video transcoding, some remote access and photosharing, and other sync options that run from proprietary codecs, Hersch says; it can’t be released under the GPL.

“Our focus with SimpleCenter is to give consumers the ability to access all their media and devices,” says Michael Hirsch, director of product development for UEI. “Most of the time they have to use different applications for every device. It’s cumbersome and confusing.”

With UEI’s ongoing efforts to expand and enrich SimpleCenter’s feature set, it began to explore new avenues of research. “One of the things we’ve been struggling with is being able to have access to all the devices we want to support and the ongoing testing that is necessary,” says Randy Fish, the lead engineer for SimpleCenter. “We’ve always been a small team, and it’s not possible for us to test every MP3 player and cell phone out there.” Fish discovered the possibilities of interacting with an open source development community watching what happened with another SimpleDevices product, Omnifi, after it was no longer manufactured or supported. “Some users developed a community around it and they were adding features that we never really thought of.”

UEI thought open-sourcing SimpleCenter might be a way to leverage the interest and participation of developers in the community. “We’re up against some big players with big budgets,” Hersch says. “The idea was, how do we compete against that in a way that gets us a product that’s more in line with what users actually want.” In August of 2006, UEI released SimpleCenter as GPL software and set up a project page at SimpleCenter.org.

Fish had no experience with open source software before SimpleCenter was GPLed; in fact, no one at Universal Electronics had ever worked with anything except proprietary software. “This is a new realm for us,” Fish says. “We’re learning as we go how best to work in the open source environment.”

There has been no shortage of interested developers, Fish says, but the challenge has been to persuade those who make changes or add features to give those changes back. For instance, he says, one developer has written code to enable SimpleCenter to run on Linux, but he just hasn’t gotten around to submitting the patches. “They’re on their own timeline,” Fish says. “Obviously, we can’t force them to check anything back in. But we’re trying to figure out ways to incent them to contribute the code back.” UEI is considering offering small rewards like free universal remotes to entice coders to share their enhancements.

One of the biggest challenges UEI is facing is “having the community know that we’re out there,” Fish says. “Getting them to want to contribute. We’re still working toward that, and just getting the word out there that we are open source is one of the first steps. One thing we did think of that might be hard to facilitate is to have some sort of contest for contributions.” Fish says UEI hasn’t hired any open source developers yet, but the company would consider it. “A contest winner would be a solid candidate” for any possible job openings, he says.

Fish says that UEI will probably save some money on research and development as a result of opening the code, but that wasn’t the initial motivation for GPLing SimpleCenter. “We really just want to throw as wide a net over people as possible. There’s a strong analogy to our core remote control business: we capture infrared codes, but we really rely on end users to provide some of that data back to us.” Hersch adds that having a community surrounding SimpleCenter “allows us time to focus on core features that will enable a better experience. If the community feels a certain feature is important, then someone will add it, or motivate us to add it.”

Svoboda, in making it his goal to better understand and care for the street people of Toronto, is thinking outside the box. In 2003, he launched a ground-breaking, and eyebrow-raising, new program at Seaton House, in conjunction with nearby St. Michael’s hospital, that allows the homeless to enter the program with their bottles, which are stored. Seaton workers then distribute small glasses of wine to the men on an hourly basis. This seems counterintuitive, but Svoboda says it actually reduces alcohol consumption and trades hard liquor for a more benign substance in a controlled environment. Getting them in the doors is the important part. Then, as the doctors and staff gain the clients’ trust, a lot of them drink less. Some of them even take further steps to recover from their illnesses and resume a normal life.

The initiative was reaching some men, but Svoboda knew it wouldn’t be enough. The program at Seaton was temporary, and most of the men went back to the streets and the deadly environment they call home. Sooner or later, they ended up at Seaton or St. Michael’s, where they were treated for whatever immediate problem had surfaced, and then released. With a vicious cycle of “treat, release, treat, release,” no one was getting the kind of long-term care and followup so desperately needed. Svoboda decided that what the local organizations needed was a system of coordination that would keep track of the men while still respecting their privacy and allowing them to maintain some control in their care.

Svoboda says he’s not particularly technology-savvy, so at first the system was strictly a paper trail. “We were doing it through paper forms and meetings with staff,” he says. “It worked, in the sense that the individual personalities involved were very enthusiastic, but the information flow was problematic.” It was tedious and time-consuming to fill out the forms every time a client came in, and depending on the severity of the situation, paperwork was less important than saving a life.

But the paper-based system was better than no system at all. The project was deemed successful by the city of Toronto, which asked Svoboda to begin a city-wide integration of what would soon be called the Shelter Hospital Integration Fusion and Evaluation (SHIFE). With several more institutions to coordinate, Svoboda realized that he needed more than paper. “We knew a lot of the work could be done more efficiently if we developed an information system. All the various tasks that need to be done, like ordering medicines and transcribing doctors’ orders, have to be done with limited staff, and we wanted to make it all streamlined.” Svoboda and his team tried to create a software application from scratch, but that effort fell apart because management at Seaton and St. Michael’s didn’t consider it a high priority. “It went belly up,” he says. “It was on volunteer time and we had volunteer developers. We made some requests for quotes from software developers, and they were $300-400K with $40K licensing fees. That was beyond anything we could do.”

SHIFE went to the city and asked for $1.7 million in funding. It took a long time to go through, and the program received only $700K, but that was enough to get started on a computerized system. Still, Svoboda didn’t want to spend all of SHIFE’s money on software development. He consulted with the developer who had volunteered his time to begin building the original system, Johan Macedo, who had since gotten a job coding for the city of Toronto. “He did a bunch of research on what the best options would be, and decided that the software he’d originally worked on was outdated,” Svoboda says. “He came across OSCAR, and said, ‘Why don’t we take this and build on it?’”

The Open Source Clinical Application Resource (OSCAR) began in 1988 as a simple DOS medical records system written by Dr. David Chan while he was a student at McGill University in Montreal. When Macedo found OSCAR, it had matured into a complete client-server application designed for the Linux operating system, and licensed under the terms of the GPL. “We met with David Chan and he got very excited,” Svoboda says. “We all thought this was going to be really great.” Macedo set about creating enhancements and modules on top of OSCAR.

With a new foundation to build on, Client Access to Integrated Services and Information (CAISI) was born as a new phase of Macedo’s project. “We’re still sorting out the branding of everything,” Svoboda says. Though CAISI remains a development project separate from OSCAR, “It’s all very collegial -– we see it all as contributing to OSCAR.” CAISI has spurred new activity in a true open source development project that is inviting developers to share their talents with a cause that hopes to do some real good in Toronto.

And this coding project is one that isn’t like to go “belly up” anytime soon. The new modules and functionality are opening up new distribution avenues for OSCAR. “What we’ve found is that the functionality we thought was very specific [to CAISI] turns out is very applicable in a doctor’s office too. We have a need to have case management for different programs so a client can have a record of care,” he says. “In a doctor’s office, they have different programs of care as well, perhaps with a dietitian or a nurse practitioner, or social work programs, and they want to keep track.”

He stresses that the software development is a subset of CAISI, which is itself a system of procedures to coordinate efforts between care providers. The technology is merely a means to an end -– but it is still an important means. “We have about six agencies using the software now,” Svoboda says. “We’re about to launch an integrator,” which is code that will allow all the agencies to refer clients between them. “Our aim is to have full integration by November or December, and to get further funding to continue development. If that doesn’t happen, we hope to have at least three solid months of operations.” With funds coming from the ministry of health, Svoboda is trying to get other cities involved, and is exploring the idea of “pay what you can” with some agencies. A customized version of the software will cost other agencies $15,000, plus another $2,500 for necessary hardware.

Svoboda says he is glad he discovered open source software. He had only heard of Linux before getting involved with this development project. “I’m a physician, I don’t follow this kind of stuff,” he says. “When Johan told us about this and we all got excited, I read the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar , and got so impressed by the whole movement and how it works. Since then, I’ve changed my browser to Mozilla, and I’m trying to get OpenOffice.org on my computer.” About the CAISI development project, he says, “It’s been working out so well. We’re all crazy open source freaks now.”