Friday, November 30, 2007

Why LIMS? & New Bika Health Mailing List

Why LIMS?
To facilitate the adoption of open source software in laboratories, and to help motivate the use of Bika in laboratories aimed at their decision makers, we created this thorough document. This document includes the following sections; Summary, Totaling the Cost of LIMS Ownership, Benefits through resource optimization, Key benefit areas, So Why LIMS?, Why web based? (web based vs web enabled), Why professional open source?, Why Bika?
I recommend it as a must read for any laboratory considering their next LIMS purchase, and considering lowering their total cost of ownership. Who wants to pay licenses, if there's an alternative? ;-)

New Bika Health Mailing List
Over the last year and a bit, we've had at least 40 solid requests for a medical or health LIMS/LIS, recently the activity has intensified, with even a couple of sponsors lining up. To better organize the discussion about this next project of Bika Lab Systems; Bika Health, we have created a specific group for it. The group is open to the public, but posting requires membership, you can apply directly at the group, or send me an email. The purpose of this group? The following intro says it all:

"This discussion group is to establish requirements and development plans for Bika Health, an open source laboratory information management system (LIMS) for medical laboratories, based on feature rich Bika LIMS 2

For more information please visit the Bika Health project page at www.bikalabs.com/health, the central repository for project deliverables"

Ooh yeah, here is the group's URL: http://groups.google.com/group/bika-health

Friday, November 23, 2007

Microsoft bashing?

No fortunately, they (Bill Hilt and his colleagues from Microsoft) are making it easy enough for us not having to motivate or substantiate our antipathy for MS. They are doing it all by themselves!

This morning I came across this excellent article (Microsoft's open-source rhetoric remains dangerously inconsistent written by Ryan Paul on the ars technica website) and apart from scratching my head, trying to figure out how they actually want/plan to be involved with Open Source. Bill comes out with quite some contradictory statements in his interview with InformationWeek (Microsoft's Bill Hilf Reveals Its Open Source Strategy ~ what strategy one wonders....).

Ach, I guess nothing new here :-)

Seen as it's Friday (or if you're in the US, you're probably on leave already), you may be looking for some additional reading, then I can recommend heading straight to the discussion pages on this article.

Finally, I want to wish our US readers a happy thanksgiving, and the rest of you a good week-end.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Open Source ~ just Marketing or the Real thing?

It has come to my attention through several mailing lists, that the term: 'Open Source' is more and more used to further some companies' marketing work, without necessarily backing it up with a generally accepted FOSS licenses and are reluctant to make the source available (specifically to non-clients of that product).

From the word go, we at Bika Lab Systems tried to implement the OS philosophy as well as we could, and to the best of our understanding. Therefore seeing other software companies (whether developers or implementors) trying to vie for attention through shady marketing tactics, does not go down well with us.

I guess having a clear OS license should do the trick, but the last couple of days I have kept on wondering whether there shouldn't be some form of certification issued by a proper (governmental or not) FOSS 'referee'. What do you think?

Now, Bika Lab Systems, has tried to poll its users and developers through its Mailing Lists, to find out if we are doing enough as a company to distinguish between the Open Source Bika Community and Bika Lab systems the company. Unfortunately I got very little feedback, I guess no news is good news in this case. But it still leaves us with a little bit of insecurity...

Since having made the decision to go Open Source and subsequently releasing our software under the GNU General Public License, we had the Community website (http://bika.sourceforge.net) and the corporate Bika Lab Systems website (http://www.bikalabs.com).
We are Plone fans, that much is sure, and maintaining a static html site, seemed a bit archaic. We continually add content to the bikalabs.com website (according to one on-line tool, we have in excess of 700 public pages on the site!), which is not only directly applicable to Bika Lab Systems the company, but is the knowledge base of the Bika Community.

So here's the question that maybe readers of this blog (any?) would like to comment on; Would you be happier (feel that Bika is more FLOSS) if we moved over most of the software & help center to a new (Plone) site with the http://www.bikalabs.org URL? (the idea of the new site, would be to grant access to members of the willing community to contribute directly on the site)
And what else, could we do to make the community more involved? For example, would you be happier if Bika would be managed by a foundation (such as Plone is managed by) and if so, would you participate in that foundation?
Rolling on with the bandwagon, would you rather see a foundation for the whole of Bika, or would it be better to set-up a foundation for each industry that we are targeting, i.e. a Bika Health foundation, Bika Interlab foundation, etc?

Look forward to your comments and feedback!

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Bika LIMS 2.0 Alpha ~ Updated

Anneline upgraded the on-line Bika LIMS 2 Alpha installation with the latest to 2.0.10 at http://bika3.bikalabs.com/bika/, where we'll continue testing. Purists might object to the unconventional numbering...

Mods:
  • New representation of analysis types on Worksheets in rows
  • Standards implemented on Worksheets
  • Changed the implementation of Blanks - now a type of Standard
  • Order number on AR
  • Links to clients and contacts on AR lists
  • Worksheet templating working again
  • Sample point made compulsory

If you want access for a look around, please contact me at Joris@bikalabs.com - pls mention you want access to Bika LIMS 2.0.
If you manage to break it (please try) please log details in the SourceForge tracker. URLs on the front page at http://bika3.bikalabs.com/bika/