Dear Tim,
Thank's for that very documented summary. As you mention it , "available to anyone at no cost" is the first issue but definitively open source tools is at least the goal, but probably also a way to achieve the goal of a public health tools. (imho)
Gilles
epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca a écrit :
epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:
Dear all,
You will find here an interesting comapraison of free tools for Outbreak Investigation http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ew/2007/070111.asp#4
And of course Epidata is recommended :)
Thank's to all participating and specialy to Jens !
Gilles
Unfortunately the authors of that article have confused "public domain" with "available to anyone at no cost".
Software is only "in the public domain" if no-one asserts copyright over it - therefore it is owned by no-one , and consequently anyone can create modified versions and assume ownership over those modified versions and sell or distribute them to others.
"Public domain" software, which is quite rare, should not be confused with "free, open-source software" (FOSS, sometimes also referred to as "free/libre open-source software" (FLOSS). For FOSS, copyright ownership is always strongly asserted and protected. However, the copyright holders of FOSS also grant a license to others which allows them to use, modify and re-distribute the software to others, provided that the FOSS licensing arrangements and the copyright ownership remain unchanged. The underlying source code is also made available to permit others to modify or improve the software as they see fit. In practice, these arrangements tend to encourage co-operative improvement of software projects, rather than competitive splitting of projects into incompatible derivatives, although the latter can and does sometimes happen. The main effect of FOSS licensing is to remove the monopoly which the copyright holder otherwise has on the fixing of bugs and the creation of improved or customised versions.
An example of public domain software in the health sphere is the hospital information system VistA created by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. In theory, parts of Epi Info written by US Federal government employees at CDC are, under US law, in the public domain. However attempts by various parties over the last decade to obtain access to the underlying source (program) code for the theoretically public domain parts of Epi Info have been unsuccessful. In addition some parts of the original Epi Info and large parts of Epi Info for Windows were written by or belong to parties outside the US CDC and thus are not even theoretically public domain. Thus Epi Info is at best partially public domain in a theoretical sense, but in practice is not, because CDC assert copyright of the software as a whole in the only form in which it can be freely downloaded from their Web site.
EpiData is definitely not "public domain". Copyright over all parts of it is asserted by the EpiData Association.
Neither Epi Info or EpiData are free, open source software (FOSS) - they are not provided under a FOSS license which permits enhancement or modification or redistribution to others, nor is the programming source code needed to make such enhancements available. I understand that there are long-term plans to release EpiData and its underlying source code under a free, open source license, but the timeframe for this change in licensing is unknown at this stage.
Both Epi Info and EpiData are available to anyone at no cost. This is probably the issue of greatest immediate interest to most epidemiologists and other public health practitioners. However, in the long-term, free, open source licensing of epidemiological and public health tools should, in theory, lead to greater collaboration over their development and thus faster progress.
Tim C
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