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"Ahmad Risk" writes:
| So, why not shift the investment from the infant to the toddler?
Hi Ahmad - not quite sure what you're getting at there.
I think John's point is that the folk involved in the various eLib
projects will already have tackled a number of the problems faced by
the NeLH, and may be able to offer a few words of advice and support -
particularly on the technical side, and with regard to 'open source'
software. Many of us have even been working on open source software
since before the term was coined :-)
One really big problem eLib faces now (IMHO) is that there's a danger
of many of the projects' results winking out of existence as the
machines running their websites die or get recycled, now that most of
the projects have finished. I think we need to be careful to archive
the results of the eLib programme, in order to avoid having to repeat
the work later on. As it happens, this is (coincidentally :-), a
compelling argument for open source - everyone in the same position
and trying to solve the same problems gets to pool their best ideas.
If it's properly preserved, the work done on a project can still be
useful even when the specific project which resulted in it coming into
being has long since ceased to exist.
You might argue that this is an altruistic approach which bears no
relation to real life, but I would point you to the Netcraft survey of
WWW servers [1] which shows that the open source Apache WWW server
dominates the field (at least on publicly accessible WWW servers :-)
with almost 60% market share. This alone is evidence enough that open
source works. The Apache source code has had a very large number of
contributors, including (in a small way) myself. You can do it too.
The catch is that there is no catch.
You can read more about the history of Apache, and about the free
software movement in general in the book "Open Sources: Voices from
the Open Source Revolution", published by O'Reilly & Associates. This
is available for a very reasonable price (ISBN 1-56592-582-3, thirteen
quid from amazon.co.uk) or (even better!) for free from [2].
And when we're talking about spending NHS money (which could have been
used to increase the number of hospital beds, hire more doctors and
nurses, and so on), it would seem that getting the most out of the
taxpayer's money spent on establishing the NeLH is of paramount
importance ? ;-)
Martin
[1] <URL:http://www.netcraft.co.uk/survey/>
[2] <URL:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html>
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