Forking and committing - OSS in informatics
I'm always amazed by the plethora and quality of software released by the biomedical informatics community. I personally have benefited from great projects like i2b2 and cTAKES amongst many others, and know of a ton of others that are available for use. While not to question or point out any particular project, there are examples where there is an existing system that does something quite well, and another organization either funds or gets funding to build another similar system. It's true that in many cases this can bring about a new innovation or new direction in solving a problem, but one also has to question the amount of resource that's being used to reinvent basic components. To make this more concrete, let's come up with a hypothetical example of two open source de-identification systems. System A is developed and provides an algorithm that performs fairly well, as well as a user interface that allows people to review documents. System B is also deve...