Nice thinking from IBM here. They’ve announced they’re working to open source software to help infectious disease reporting so that everyone around the world can be better prepared to deal with H5N1 (the bird flu). It’s not purely egalitarian, of course: IBM’s identified healthcare information systems as a market opportunity (yes yes, feel free to make all the Disease 2.0 jokes you want) and will tie the software they give away into their cash-creating healthcare platform. But it’s nice to see open source acknowledged as a public good. The real problem, of course, is countries not reporting properly.
