A Medical Open-Source Legal Hell Hole

To open-source or not to open-source was never in question as far as Steve Shreeve, founding CEO and largest shareholder of Medsphere Systems Corp., was concerned. So, this summer, Steve, self-proclaimed open-source software leader, and his twin-brother Scott, released the companys matured code on SourceForge under the GPL.

Their reward? They were then sued for $50 million by their company.

To be exact, they were hit by a $50 million, 12-count lawsuit charging them with misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of contract, breach of duty of loyalty, violations of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act, commission of computer crimes, intentional interference with contract relations, unfair competition, and still more complaints by their company.

The core of the dispute is software that has been built on "VistA" (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture), the US Veterans Administrations public domain HER (Electronic Health Record) system. VistA has become the foundation for several proprietary and open-source medical record software suites.

One of these suites is Medspheres OpenVista. This program has no relationship to Microsofts Vista.

An OpenVista stack is made up of a minimum of Linux, GT.M (an open-source implementation of the MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) language, EsiObjects (a MUMPs objects extension), and VistA. The base OpenVista code, under the name WorldVista, is on SourceForge.

Read the full story on Linux-Watch: A Medical Open-Source Legal Hell Hole.

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.