NHS Apps to be open source?
There is an interesting video from Matt Parker of Humble Pie fame on you tube where he challenges his viewers to improve his code. He has some code that takes hours and hours to run and currently the viewers have managed to get it to run in 300us. something like 40Billion times faster. Imagine if my clinical system ran 40billion times faster.
So should NHS D force all for NHS apps to be open source? Discuss…
I can see that some people might be worried that it would allow hackers to find vulnerabilities - but would it also allow people to fix them?
Would it allow people to add features? to improve processes? would an army of open sources get involved or would no one be interested? a recent debate on here suggested that there is no point in start-ups getting involved in primary care as there is no money - but what about lone programmers - they often do it for fame/or interest/publicity/ reputation? would a cohort of programmers want to give back to the NHS by improving its code?
If we forced existing software code to be open sourced - would coders be horrified or impressed?