Hi Nigel, A very big welcome to the project. Always love debate and all the better for the project. :) Many of the issues you raise are extremely valid and when we put together our model some time ago we thought long and hard about the issues you raised in relation to the vision we were trying to acheive. In the end we always came up against some major issues. Firstly in order for a practice to take on the software or be willing to trial the software there needed to be a certain level of functionality in place as most, if not all, of the practices where already running existing software. Many of the current commercial software systems were quite sophisticated so the level of initial functionality required was quite high. Secondly, the Veterinary market is a relatively small Vertical market and as such could not hope to attract the contribution support of say a Sugra-CRM project in order for the project to progress in a timely manner and deliver a version that met the functionality requirements above. We see evidence of this in the many vertical market open source projects that have started but never ended in a viable functional system and have eventually died with little or no installed base. I think thirdly we thought very carefully about the open source ideals and how it related to the veterinary community. We saw the major issues being vendor lockout, poor support, lack of software quality assuarance, lack of industry participation, isv rather than industry driven development, inability to choose a service provider and other small software industry hurdles that open source could solve. We considered these more important than maintaining the end user cost to zero. So in the end we decided to find funding to kick start the development and put in place a subscription model that we thought was very fair to the industry and could "possibly" pay back the funding over a period of 5 years and provide some level of ongoing support to the project. We had faith that the majority of veterinary practices would see this small yearly payment as their way to take control back of the software industry and drive it in a more open direction to their benefit. Of course if we are wrong and all they were looking for was a free lunch then the project will fail and the status quo will remain. I really do think we sit very much on the open source side of of line between a commercial and the altruistic Foss (free and Open Source Software) project you refer to. We have purposely designed the business structure to be not for profit so there is no chance of the project being kidnapped and moved towards a more commercial model and we have put in place constitutional protections for this. I fully understand your point about the perception that paying money naturally guarantees some support and quality. The quality side we believe we can handle by employing proper software engineering process's and rigorous peer review and testing of the core product. This is the benefit of having some funds to spend on the management of the project. The support issue is more complex as you indicate. Our aim is to provide a centralised community repository of the tools, documentation and knowledge to support devlopers, integrators and implementors and even some practices who have internal IT resources but we are, cannot be and do not plan to be, a first level support organisation. In fact the whole idea behind the project was to foster a greater number of service providers to the industry who are free to deliver not only hardware integration services but can also deliver training, development and the necessary support services. Practices can then select their service provider on a truly commercial/quality basis. Currently many service providers are locked out of these areas and find it difficult or impossible to provide the overall quality of service they want to. As you indicated you are hamstrung by poor support at a high cost and powerless to do anything about it. Moving to other commercial, non open source, alternatives may or may not solve this issue. From my experience in this industry it most likely won't as even if a company initially provides good support subsquent business restructures, loss of key personnel and technical issues can change this very quickly. I don't believe you can compare this project with other horizontal market projects like SugarCRM, Ofbiz, etc. They have a much larger potential user base and can clearly differentiate functional areas. I think it would be very difficult to work out what should and should not be in a open source or commercial version of a veterinary product and it may even end up a source of friction and discontent within the community. Something we do not want. As far as evaluation is concerned there is no need to subscribe unless you are putting the product into a full production environment . So play to your hearts content , test scaling, functionality, develop, build, comment, criticise as much as you want. When you want to really use it , pay the subscription. BTW it is a honesty system as well. There is nothing in the software to prevent you from not paying the subscription but we believe and hope that the very low yearly fee and the ethics of the industry will see this occur very rarely. In regards the FTE based subscription fees we thought long and hard about what was fair and this seemed to best way to spread the load amongst different sized and turnover practices. Logins or workstation licenses is not fair as it penalises practices who want practice wide access to the software but only have limited staff and where workstations are used generically not for a particular user ( pretty comon scenario in any practice) As far as your specific, large multi site case we are very willing to discuss how best to structure so it is fair. This is indicated in the subscription document for sites with 13+ FTE's. We understand there will be different scenarios that we will need to cater for. You should understand we are not trying to make a killing here just spread the funding load equitably. I very much look forward to further discussions on this and other issues and hopefully you will be convinced to become an active part of the OpenVPMS community. Kind Regards Tony