In developed countries, healthcare workers represent a significant proportion of the working population. For example, in the United Kingdom, more than 1 million people work for the National Health Service, a publicly funded healthcare system. Medical software therefore has a huge market to tap.

A free and simple piece of open source software is helping manage the spread of disease in developing countries.

"...IWEEE is not a pure technical conference. It will focus on the human factor and in raising awareness about the actual situation. We will discuss the tools that we can provide today to doctors and institutions to improve their habitants health and education.

Open source software benefits professionals in all industries: government, Internet, business, education, and even health care. Expensive software and subscriptions for anti virus systems, supporting electronic medical records and even phone or e-mail communications can put on a strain on small clinics as well as larger hospitals.

Why is the uptake of free software in developing countries poor? Glyn Moody looks at one of the problems and offers a solution the community could participate in

Hans-Holger Schmuhl has launched a new online medical portal that lists a number of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) projects aimed at the health care and medical professions. So far, more than 120 projects, in a number of categories, have been listed

Reddit has decided to do a blackout against SOPA / PIPA on January 18th. Too much hangs in the balance. Some people have commented that why should other countries care besides US, well if this goes through it will very soon happen in other countries as well. Hopefully others will join the protest.

For three health care centers, the challenge was clear: Find a way to improve internal communications by expanding e-mail accounts to all employees, including doctors, nurses, security staffers and dietary workers, without breaking their IT budgets.

In today's world, we have a "digital divide," wherein some people have the means and tools to exploit technology and others do not. In most developing countries, people still pirate software because they cannot afford to pay for it.