OpenEMR is not Affiliated with LibreHealth

OpenEMR is not Affiliated with LibreHealth

Quick Summary

Despite what you may of heard, OpenEMR is NOT joining hands with LibreHealth.

Rather than focusing on creating a superior and excellent product, LibreHealth is instead focusing their resources on false marketing machinations to claim endorsement from the great brand that is OpenEMR.

OpenEMR is doing everything it can to combat these false marketing machinations.

And OpenEMR will not be derailed from its continued focus on producing a superior and excellent product.

More Details

Several prior members of the community forked the project in April of 2016. This is not an uncommon event in the open source world and is not necessarily a bad thing sometimes driving competition to produce a better product. Ironically, one of the main stated goals of the fork was modernization, which has simply not been the case, and their fork has missed out on the hundreds of bug fixes, security fixes, features, and modernization improvements that make OpenEMR what it is.

Recently, rather than focusing on their product, they have instead shifted to false marketing and advertising to claim endorsement from the solid OpenEMR brand.

Their marketing has also attempted to give the appearance that OpenEMR is a stale project. This is simply not the case, with downloads of OpenEMR going greater than 10,000 per month (yes, 10,000 per month!!!), 54 separate developers contributing to the code over the last 12 months!, an active forum providing support for users, and the transparent support from a non profit organization.

One particular damaging stategy that LibreHealth pursued was to garner the endorsement of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Notably, the Software Freedom Conservancy appeared to have done minimal, if any, due diligence on their part and never contacted the OpenEMR community or the OEMR organization. The OpenEMR community sent the following letter to the Librehealth community and to the Software Freedom Conservancy on 11/17/2016 regarding their press release:

OpenEMR, open-emr.org, has resulted from a vibrant community of
volunteers and contributors working together for over a decade. We, the
OpenEMR community, remain dedicated to maintaining OpenEMR's excellence
while guarding this free, open source, software solution for electronic
medical records. We do not endorse this use of the OpenEMR name to
promote this project and we do not believe that uncoordinated
development efforts are in the best interests of users.

Please immediately remove from this announcement and any promotional
materials any suggestion that the current OpenEMR leadership or
community is supportive of this project. Those mentioned in the
announcement are no longer active in our community and are not in any
way entitled to speak for it.

Signed,
Arnab Naha, Brady Miller, Cathy Stillwell
Chelălău Ionuț Mihai, John Tenny, Matthew Vita
Ray Magauran, Roberto Vasquez, Robert Down
Rod Roark, Scott Wakefield, Sena Palanisami
Shameem Hameed, Sherwin Gaddis, Srinivasa Rao Challa
Stephen Waite, Tomas Vilhelm

Current members and leaders
of the OpenEMR community

It is also notable that when OpenEMR members reached out to LibreHealth members publicly in a objective and professional way, they were attacked in an ad hominem style.

What you can do to help OpenEMR!

1. Keep using OpenEMR.

2. Keep participating in the OpenEMR community.

3. Keep supporting OpenEMR vendors.

4. Send a message to the Software Freedom Conservancy that you disagree with their teaming up with Librehealth to claim endorsement of the OpenEMR brand. They can be emailed at project-intake@sfconservancy.org . And if you donate or plan to donate to their organization, demand they remediate the damage they have done before placing your donation.

5. Send a message to LibreHealth that you disagree with their false marketing and advertising.