OStatic

Ever heard of OpenMRS? It's a community-developed, open source electronic medical record system framework. As anybody in the United States knows, it's not that easy to put together any kind of functional electronic system for medical records. OpenMRS has an additional challenge, though: It's focused on making these systems work in developing countries, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria cause suffering for millions of people. OpenMRS helps educate and support people in developing countries on how to keep up a sustainable medical records system. Now, open source business intelligence software provider Pentaho is part of the mix.

Are you familiar with Pentaho? The Florida-based company was founded by a team of Business Intelligence (BI) industry veterans from commercial BI companies including Cognos, Hyperion, IBM, Oracle, and more. Pentaho offers a suite of open source BI applications, and, akin to how Red Hat works, gets its revenues from support and management services for its enterprise customers. (It also offers a commercial Enterprise Edition.) We recently checked in with Bill Seyler, a Senior Software Engineer at Pentaho. Among other thoughts, he points out that open source is in need of better monetization models.