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.

The healthcare services company moved 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital in Boston, Mass., has migrated to Red Hat solutions

When I talk to organization X (fill in your favorite health care entity, government or medical society) they never fail to utter the dreaded statement: "We are vendor neutral." followed by a dramatic long pause.

How does License Proliferation effect medical software and what can we do about it? How to choose a license for your medical software project? What are the implications for the medical FOSS community of various software licenses? This is intended to be a complete guide to free and open source software licensing for medical software. Please comment on how I can make it better.

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

McKesson, Android and G1 hit by patent trolls .

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.

The "Great Recession" has businesses and consumers alike looking for ways to cut costs. That includes looking for cheaper alternatives to expensive software.