Free software
From AlaskaClinic
The Alaska Clinic LLC is implementing Free software as an important part of our goal of reducing the cost and extending the access to medical care. Another objective in adopting free software is to develop a common and inter-operable platform for medical research with the goal of accelerating the discovery and adoption of novel medical therapies.
This software tool chain has developed over the last 25 years and has been an indispensable element in the deployment and huge success of the global Internet and communications technology in general. We firmly believe that these technologies will have a profound effect and encourage a renaissance in medical research, prevention and therapeutics.
Below we summarize some of these technologies.
Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VISTA) is an enterprise-wide medical information system that we have adopted as our core health information technology. Much of the success of this system can be attributed to the Hardhats This rich and interesting history is more fully explained for you here
GT.M is the high-performance M(UMPS) database engine. You can read more about M and its history here
Samba is software that can be run on UNIX, Linux, IBM System 390, OpenVMS, and other operating systems. Samba uses the TCP/IP protocol that is installed on the host server. When correctly configured, it allows that host to interact with a Microsoft Windows client or server as if it is a Windows file and print server. The two key programs are smbd and nmbd. Their job is to implement the four basic modern-day CIFS services, which are:
* File & print services * Authentication and Authorization * Name resolution * Service announcement (browsing)
Debian GNU/Linux system runs the bulk of our servers. It is used across the world in thousands of critical production environments. It is very well supported, offers tens of thousands of pre-compiled software packages and has a unique and reliable update/upgrade method.
CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.
Asterisk an impressive and successful open source telephony project. It is at the core of our VOIP implementation.
Postfix is a free open source mail transfer agent (MTA), a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. It is intended as a fast, easy-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA. It was originally written by Wietse Venema during a stay at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and continues to be actively developed today. One of the strengths of Postfix is its handling of large amounts of e-mail. Postfix is built as a cooperating network of different daemons. Each daemon fulfills a single task using minimum privileges. In this way, if a daemon is compromised, the impact remains limited to that daemon and cannot spread throughout the entire system. There is only one process with root privileges (master), and a few (local, virtual, pipe) that actually write to disk or invoke external programs. Most daemons can be easily chrooted.
The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards. Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996.
Openoffice is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites.
phpgroupware is a fully featured, web based messaging, collaboration and enterprise management platform. It comes with over 50 applications that can be mixed and matched according to your needs; contacts management, shared calendar, web content and document management and sharing, project management, issues tracking and much more.
XFS: A high-performance journaling filesystem, provides the following major features: Quick Recovery - The XFS journaling technology allows it to restart very quickly after an unexpected interruption, regardless of the number of files it is managing. Traditional filesystems must do special filesystem checks after an interruption, which can take many hours to complete. The XFS journaling avoids these lengthy filesystem checks.
Fast Transactions - The XFS filesystem provides the advantages of journaling while minimizing the performance impact of journaling on read and write data transactions. Its journaling structures and algorithms are tuned to log the transactions rapidly. XFS uses efficient tree structures for fast searches and rapid space allocation. XFS continues to deliver rapid response times, even for directories with tens of thousands of entries.
Massive Scalability - XFS is a full 64-bit filesystem, and thus is capable of handling filesystems as large as a million terabytes. XFS implements extremely sophisticated space management techniques. Efficiency in space management has been achieved through the use of variable sized extents, rather than the simple single-block-at-a-time mechanism of many other filesystems. XFS was the first filesystem to implement delayed space allocation for buffered writes, supports direct I/O, provides an optional realtime allocator, and is able to align allocations based on the geometry of the underlying storage device. The XFS allocator performs admirably in the presence of multiple parallel writers, and is renowned for its resistance to space fragmentation under such conditions; in addition to many other capabilities.
Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
TightVNC is a free remote control software package derived from the popular VNC software. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer. TightVNC is:
* free, GPL-licensed, with full source code available; * useful in remote administration, remote customer support, education, and for many other purposes; * cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.
BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up PCs, laptops, servers and other devices to disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain. A clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk I/O. Identical files across multiple backups of the same or different PCs are stored only once resulting in substantial savings in disk storage and disk I/O. A powerful web user interface allows one to view log files, configuration, current status and allows for browsing and restoring files from backups.
HylaFAX is an enterprise-class system for sending and receiving facsimiles as well as for sending alpha-numeric pages. The software is designed around a client-server architecture. Fax modems may reside on a single machine on a network and clients can submit an outbound job from any other machine on the network. HylaFAX is designed to be very robust and reliable. The fax server is designed to guard against unexpected failures in the software, in the configuration, in the hardware and in general use. HylaFAX can support multiple modems and a heavy traffic load.
Perl is a computer language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).
The Linux kernelis a Unix-like operating system kernel. The Linux Kernel was initially conceived and assembled by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Linux is a monolithic kernel. Device drivers and kernel extensions run in kernel space (ring 0), with full access to the hardware, although some exceptions run in user space.
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation. An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.
IPCop Firewall is sophisticated yet very user-friendly and task-based firewall solution. IPCop offers the critical functionality of an expensive network appliance using stock, or even obsolete hardware. It leverages the free software tool chain to accomplish these tasks.
MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this website, the home of MediaWiki.
Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and outlines what is the foundation for much of the worlds software. The GNU C library is an example of a hugely important infrastructure software technology that forms the basis of GNU.
