{"id":70086,"date":"2017-01-18T14:53:07","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T19:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=70086"},"modified":"2017-01-18T14:57:36","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T19:57:36","slug":"show-me-the-damn-code-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2017\/01\/18\/show-me-the-damn-code-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"show me the damn  code <\/strike> numbers!…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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The background image is an iPhone photo of a spreadsheet opened on that little Linux computer in the last post, and the midground is a spreadsheet from my Windows computer. They’re both Open Source versions of OpenOffice<\/a>, the free Office Suite that I use instead of Microsoft Excel [foreground]. The point of the graphic is that <\/sup><\/font>they’re basically the same<\/sup><\/font><\/strong>. If I hooked that little $35 dollar machine to a full sized monitor I could do everything on it I need to do with ease. I don’t use the new Excel because I don’t like their "ribbon" interface and I can’t make the graphing utility do what I need it to do [I wonder if they changed it just to have something new].
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Back in the early PC days, the software developers [Microsoft, Apple, etc] wanted to own their software through and through, make the code proprietary. The nerds and hackers of the world said ‘show me the damn code<\/font><\/em>‘ and the companies said ‘hell no<\/font><\/em>.’ There were lawsuits, and posturing, and all manner of haggling about whether computer code was intellectual property. For users, it was a problem because every new release [of something like Microsoft Word] meant that to get the new features, you had to buy it again or pay for an upgrade. And that extended to the operating system itself [DOS, OS]. It was a monopoly. <\/p>\n

When the World  Wide Web came along, there was a different tradition. The hardware came from the government [DARPA<\/a>] and the language that made it work [HTML<\/a>] came from a think tank [CERN<\/a>] developed by Tim Berners-Lee for internal use. The Browser used to read the HTML was Mosaic<\/a>, and later Netscape<\/a> [that was free, a version of Open Source] – built and maintained by volunteers. Microsoft wanted to grab the Internet, so they gave their Browser away too [Internet Explorer<\/a>]. Now Google’s Chrome<\/a> has jumped onto the mix. The tradition of Netscape carried the day and the Open Source<\/a> Movement took hold – Linux<\/a>, MySQL<\/a>, Open Office<\/a>, Apache server<\/a>, etc and a whole lot of other very important stuff you can’t see. So the companies held on to their proprietary code and the home computer market primarily by building user friendly interfaces [and inertia]. As Linus Torvolds<\/a> implied in the Ted interview, hackers, geeks, and nerds don’t do interfaces very well – and they sure aren’t marketeers. So now there’s a mix of Open Source and Proprietary software that’s actually mutually beneficial – a loose symbiosis of sorts. Android<\/a> being a prime example.<\/p>\n

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This battle over Data Transparency with Clinical Trials and other scientific data strikes me as similar to those early days with computer code: intellectual property, commercial interests, competition, secrecy, etc. But there’s one difference that way ups the ante. It’s abundantly apparent that proprietary ownership of the data has allowed a level of sophisticated corruption and misinformation that is unequaled in the history of medicine in my opinion. So while there’s a real similarity to the computer code wars, the stakes reach beyond commerce and into the basic fabric of medical care. Have we learned something from Open Source and related initiatives that might help get things back in the road? Maybe…<\/div>\n