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by mixonic 2042 days ago
Howdy there! I was one of the original authors of OpenEMR back in high school. I'm still good friends with at least one of the other authors. We're always stunned to see OpenEMR in the news, and watching it creep up on HackerNew today has been fun.

I've always been curious why OpenEMR seemed to dominate in the OSS space after we walked away from it. I can only theorize that the code was more approachable than other projects (PHP), and that the GPL kept the work from being captured by any one business. I can't imagine that the code was the best, I'm painfully aware of how poor the security practices must have been in hindsight.

You've given me the chance to ask a question I never knew who to ask: Why, back in 2003 (just after we stopped giving the project attention), was OpenEMR the project you decided to spend time on? What made it the attractive thing to invest in?

If you can tell me I'll bottle that elixir and pour it into every OSS effort I work on today.
2 comments
duffpkg 2042 days ago
Hi. James? I was CTO of Pennington Firm in that era and it was one of many industries where "internet modernization" was happening to a sort of sleepy status quo. OpenEMR with FreeB were the furthest along open source project at the time and so we started there. There were a lot of legacy type problems inherent in the OpenEMR codebase and I think the change to PHP 3 ultimately is what lead to starting fresh with ClearHealth. I'm dating myself but that's around the time that browser AJAX starting opening up a lot of UI possibilities.
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mixonic 2042 days ago
Howdy! Nope, I'm one of the two Matts from the Synitech, the original publishers. IIRC the codebase as we left it was heavily into iframes. iframes and SQL injection attack surface.

I'm not sure it used CSS :-p in 2001 or 2002 I actually did a lot of systems work building a version of OpenEMR which booted from CDROM but wrote the database to an attached USB storage device. The idea was that small offices had to start thinking about HIPAA compliance, and could take the disks home from their server each evening for improved security. I think that was probably the last thing I was working on in OpenEMR.

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tedjdziuba 2042 days ago
Second original co-author of OpenEMR here. He's telling the truth.
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