Med Schools Should Support Free Software

07 July 2008 in geekery, medical education, public schools, undergraduate education | No comments

I’ve always been a little unsure why medical schools (and schools in general) don’t make more extensive use of free or open-source software (that’s free as in speech, not free as in beer). It seems like a win-win situation to me: schools don’t have to pay for huge installations of expensive software, and professors and students can keep their data in open document formats that will not become obsolete. The PDFs, PostScript files, and plain text files I wrote in the mid-1980s are still easy to open and work with - can you say the same for all those old WordPerfect files? After putting so much effort into creating decent lecture notes and presentations, professors shouldn’t have their hard work suddenly rendered incompatible with the latest tools. This issue is particularly important for medical schools and hospitals, where increasingly large quantities of patient information are being stored in proprietary formats accessible only through closed-source programs. Vanderbilt, for example, uses an electronic medical record system that only functions well in Internet Explorer. Thus, every workstation in the hospital must run Windows (which undoubtedly costs the medical center thousands of dollars a year), and the systems administrators must upgrade operating systems and reprogram the EMR according to Microsoft’s release schedule. This approach lacks foresight - while the information itself is (I hope) actually stored in an open-format database, access to that information depends on a notoriously unstable and insecure operating system and browser.

And beyond these practical issues, there’s also a compelling moral and philosophical argument to be made. Schools should be institutions that encourage curiosity, innovation, and the free exchange of knowledge - all ideals that run directly against the spirit of proprietary software. Proprietary software is locked down with copyrights and patents, preventing students and professors from reading or modifying its source code. Free software, on the other hand, generally comes with an invitation to re-use, modify, or improve the code to benefit the community. By using free software, even schools and students who are uninterested in programming can express their support for freedom of thought.

Now, I’m not suggesting that every school and medical center immediately switch to Linux and ditch all proprietary software (though that would be an excellent goal). Instead, there are some easy and painless substitutions anyone can make.

Switch the default browser from Internet Explorer to Firefox.
Install OpenOffice rather than Microsoft Office, and encourage faculty and students to make the same switch on their personal computers.
Install GIMP rather than Photoshop. Or install GIMP rather than nothing, which seems to be the current standard (who in their right mind uses PowerPoint to edit images?).

For the more adventurous (or the more tech-savvy):

Use LaTeX for document preparation. Your documents will be better-structured and more beautiful (the image in this post is an example of the gorgeous output LaTeX is capable of).
Use S5 rather than PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote.
Use Debian GNU/Linux for the ultimate in stable, free computing bliss.

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