Medical Free/Libre and Open Source Software

Medfloss.org should provide a comprehensive and structured overview of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects for the health care domain. Moreover it should offer an open content platform to foster the exchange of ideas, knowledge and experiences about these projects.

Since its launch medfloss.org is intended to be an open content platform in which everyone is welcome to participate. Visitors can freely submit new content or modify existing entries. Anonymous submissions will be reviewed and moderated in order to keep the site clean from off-topic content and spam. In detail the following features and services are available at this site:

• Explore medical FLOSS projects based on application type, supported enterprise function, supported language, license, supported standard and much more (see left navigation pane "Explore projects"). Refined search by adding or removing items of these criteria (see left navigation pane "Explore projects/Multi-category browser").
• Get recommendations about projects that are similar to the one you are currently viewing (see property "Similar projects" at the bottom of each project page).
• For each project the following information is listed (if available): description, license, supported platforms, client types, supported languages, supported standards, availability of official distro packages, availability of binary packages, some technical information (programming language, framework/toolkit, DBMS), homepage and other interesting links, reference sites, professional service providers, recent news, publications, events and related projects.
• Listing of upcoming medical FLOSS events like exhibitions, trade shows, working group meetings, etc. that can be associated with specific projects and/or professional service providers (see right navigation pane "Content/Bazaar").
• Listing of companies/institutions that are offering professional services for specific projects (see right navigation pane "Content/Bazaar"), categorized by serviced country/region.
• Comprehensive bibliography of publications about medical FLOSS that is related to specific projects (see right navigation pane "Content/Bazaar").
• Listing of reference sites that are using specific projects in a productive environment/daily routine (see right navigation pane "Content/Bazaar").
• Listing of requests for new projects (see right navigation pane "Content/Bazaar").
• Project specific commenting and discussion (moderated).
• Possibility to rate projects, professional service providers and events.
• Currently about 206 projects are listed and growing ...

As this is a the moment just a spare time one-man-show, I greatly appreciated your support and collaboration by submitting new entries, improving existing ones or just by participating in the discussions.

My understanding of Open Source is like it is defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in "The Open Source Definition". To the best of my knowledge only projects that are conform to this definition are included. Most of them are published under one of the popular open source licenses like GPL, LGPL, MPL or the Apache license (Overview of open source licenses by the OSI). In other words: Typical Free-/Shareware with symptomatically closed sources is not welcome here and will be discarded.

Disclaimer: As this is mainly an open-content collaborative platform I cannot provide any guarantee of the validity, appropriateness, correctness or up-to-dateness of the here given information. In case of inappropriate content, broken links, incorrect information or improvement suggestion(s) I would greatly appreciate it if you could add / correct / improve it by yourself, leave a comment or send me a message. For more information please refer to About | Legal.

Major updates of this overview or related news will be announced on my blog under category Open Source (RSS) where you can also still find the former static list of medical FLOSS projects.

Medfloss.org is not meant/intended to be:

• A source code repository or development platform
  • Others can do better, like e.g. savannah.gnu.org or sourceforge.net
  • But medfloss.org links to them
• A forum for specific support or development issues
  • The dedicated discussion forum(s) and mailing list(s) of the actual project are intended for that
  • But medfloss.org links to them
• A place for proprietary software or Free-/Shareware with symptomatically closed sources.