iotaMed client source code is published with an open source license. The license we use is the "BSD three-clause license". This allows anyone to extend and support the core application. Our liberal license allows vendors to incorporate our code and designs in their own commercial products. Some of our products, mainly tools and servers, may not be open source, but other vendors are still free to compete with us in those areas.
The core iotaMed product will be published as open source after release. You can easily follow the evolution or, if you wish, create a fork for your own extensions. It is entirely up to you if you want to feed your extensions and improvements back into the main project, but we'd appreciate if you offered to do so. The APIs we define and use, and the file formats, including the documentation, are also open sourced. The idea is to promote use of the same APIs across the iotaMed range of products and any products, open source or not, developed by other companies, intended to work against the same information sets. This way, we create a market where a number of vendors can each provide best-of-breed solutions, while legacy EMR system vendors will only need to provide a single set of functional APIs.
We will create a number of customer specific tools, and even management tools related to iotaMed that will not be open source or free. None of these products will be essential to enable another vendor to sell iotaMed related applications. All of these products will be open to competition from others. We really don't intend to create a lock-in to some proprietary product and we will do our utmost to prevent others from doing the same. This architecture and market needs to remain open and competitive to become really useful.
We will also provide translation and interconnection services, but there is no hindrance to open competition in this space as well. A service, by its very nature, isn't open source, but at least some of the code going into these services will be. We sincerely hope that any competition we get in this space will be willing and able to interconnect with our services, so that the market does not fragment and the user gets as much utility as possible from these offerings.
The name "iotaMed" is a registered trademark, and we intend to use the power that gives us to achieve and maintain interoperability and quality. We intend to allow other vendors to use the trademark for their products on the condition that it is a product that would make us proud, which implies that it is simple and functional, while true to the iotaMed basic idea. We will also require the product in question to be as compatible as possible with our APIs and file formats. This does not mean we will dictate how these APIs and file formats should look, but it does mean both parties must be willing and able to come to an agreement on a functional and elegant solution, and then stick to it. We will not charge for the use of the trademark as such, if you pass these hurdles.