Free software is currently focused on big targets: the desktop, mobile phones, server farms, datacenters! We’re all trying to combine freedom with zero marginal cost production to offer solutions that will serve giant markets and affect billions of people. And while we’re focused on touching every single person on the planet, we’re missing the huge opportunities in serving the large group of people just smaller than “everyone”. A case in point is the small business market, one that is largely ignored by Free Software.
My sister, Julie Vasile, does reconstructive breast surgery and has reached the point in her career where she is opening a small medical office and offering her services to the public. Every modern medical office needs billing and scheduling software to manage patients and insurance. As far as I can tell, none of them can do it with Free Software. She will instead rent software services for an unconscionable sum.
Small businesses overpay for software because they often need specialized services and don’t have internal tech expertise to procure, setup and mange it. The stuff they get is small-market proprietary janky junk at inflated prices. It wouldn’t be hard for Free Software to compete in that space.
Where is the Joomla of medical billing? Where is the solution made of free software being offered everywhere for free or at least a reasonable fee? Maybe the need for website software is just obvious and universal enough to support the creation of myriad content management systems, but surely the need for medical/dental/legal office management is large enough to get us at least one professional quality solution.
If anybody wants to slay this beast, contact me. There are many, many business models that could support it.
The one that always gets me is the ordering kiosk at restaurants, the little, ubiquitous in NYC, touch screen devices that wait staff go use to get your order to the kitchen and generate a bill.
It is such a discrete dedicated task; I’ve wondered for years whether any of the existing systems are running free software or what it would take to get the right software written.
Yes, point-of-sale stuff is another huge market that is ripe for Free Software being deployed by people who make their money customizing the installation rather than writing buggy software.