Our initial placeholder name is LibreHealth. Some people aren’t in love with the “Libre” part of the name, with one reason that it mixes languages.
Personally, one thing I like about the name is that it casts our scope wider than just a medical record system, and will allow us to easily produce different software products over time.
What do others think about the name as it stands today? Do you have other suggestions? And why, or why not?
I like the part that we want to do more than medical records system… and in some sense are already doing. But I also find it hard and tongue twisting to say LibreHealth. The smooth flow is somewhat missing… My suggestions are:
FreeHealth
FressHealth (Free software system for Health) - also a wordplay on Fresh
Judy raises some good points. One other reason I do like the “Libre” is that it points to LibreHealth, a well-known community fork that has, on the balance, won big as a successful community transition story.
Regardless of the name, I think people will want to look for some peace of mind & stability in the new project.
I don’t like “Libre” in a project name. It brings back sad stories of the LibreOffice project, which is not enormously successful partly because of arguments over project name and license.
I like FreeHealth. We all want that concept implemented!
I know the road has been bumpy, but I hear different feedback from others about the project as it stands today. Can you share more about your perceptions with us? I know you were much closer to it than any of us were!
Not on purpose I won’t. I was counsel and a board member of the Apache Software Foundation at the time that Oracle gave Apache that software – and at the time that LibreOffice forked. Those secrets will remain in my brain forever.
I will, however, help you avoid those same mistakes if I can.
Yes, I saw those uses in my earlier cursory search. I found some small uses in the Netherlands and somewhere else. Nothing that warned me for your online usage of “Healthtech” as your software/project trademark for now. For now. Call it a TM.
Pick a trademark you like. In my personal opinion, Healthtech is nicer than LibreHealth to the general public. We FOSS zealots, of course, in the “Libre”/“Open”/“Free”/“FSF” communities, call everything Libre these days.
But I’ve learned never to get in the middle of a trademark romance/dispute. It can cause a fork.
I’m still not “married” to the idea of any specific name.
That said, I did remember the other day that when we received the FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit in 2013, Richard Stallman did promise the full support and assistance of the FSF if OpenMRS agreed to change it’s name to something that did not “give respect to the amoral open source movement”!
I am happy that the FSF and OSI now get along pretty well these days. (I am a member of both.) I even wanted to snap a photo of both organizations’ bosses hanging out together at the OSI booth at OSCON, but didn’t have my phone with me.
Because both Free and Libre present problems in English, perhaps we could switch to a term that shows the expansiveness and inclusiveness of the project. Expand, Inclusive, All, Every, etc.
I was referring to problems stated by others earlier in this thread. “Free” is ambiguous. “Libre” is not English and sounds odd when paired with “Health.”
Given the timing, I would like to suggest we stick with LibreHealth for now. If we feel that it’s not working in the real world, we can either (a) make our product names more verbose in some way, or (b) engage the fully community as it forms to change our name.