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vice including the application. In comparison to the
GPL license the application developer is allowed to
redistribute the modified software and an application
which is an incentive for the professional application
developer and can expand the usage of the services
itself.
Another big advantage of open source services in
the AAL context, which should be taken into account
when talking about ethical issues, is the advantage
of the transparency of the services and the code it-
self. Transparency is inherent to every release of open
source code. The customers can see it and thus the
vendor has no secrets.
But transparency also applies to vendor’s opera-
tions. Vendors who are opaque on their strategy gain
fewer benefits from a open source release of code.
The most successful open source vendors are trans-
parent on their strategies and the most successful open
source customers are transparent in turn, being frank
about their needs. Transparency, the need for it, the
desire for it, extends outward from there. The advan-
tage of the usage of open source in eHealth and AAL
projects concerning the support of standards has been
pointed out as a need by the member states of the Eu-
ropean Union. There is a need to support actions that
cover the development of standards addressing the in-
teroperability of diverse systems and services and to
explore in particular the possibilities of open source
applications to achieve this objective. In this context,
the need for future standards is clearly emphasized
to solve interoperability concerns in a way that all
stakeholders will benefit from the possible adoption
of Open Source reference implementations for care
services. In addition, an open and more free access
to future and existing e-Health and general interop-
erability standards in the AAL and eHealth service
providing should be recommended, taking inspiration
from models such as the World Wide Web Consor-
tium. The exchange of experience in the use of open
standards and open source solutions among health ad-
ministrations in Member States should be promoted
(European Commission, 2004). Success in develop-
ing a European e-Health Area and AAL standard con-
form platform will draw on sharing best practices and
experience across the Union, as systems are deployed
and organizations redesigned. Open source applica-
tions play an important role in achieving interoper-
ability (European Commission, 2004).
Maybe the biggest ethical issue when providing
open source services in the AAL context is the issue
of data privacy and data protection. This is very im-
portant because the services generally developed in
AAL related middleware and application projects use
medical and social relevant data which underlie spe-
cial data privacy regulations.
The advantage of transparency of open source
code and the possibility that any expert has the pos-
sibility to find security leaks and general mistakes in
the code and can fix them, leads also to a high de-
mand on secure software development and the inte-
gration of security services so that the transparency
can not be misused. As a result of the transparency
the application developer can fix and provide special
data security, e.g. in the case of medical data treat-
ment, and provide it as a business to user organization
or private users.
The transparency of open source also gives the
possibility to expand the functionality of the service
or the application, which can be part of a business
strategy, and to learn from the structure and interfaces
of already implemented services.
A very important point concerning the usage of
open source software components is the community,
which uses and kind of maintains the project or at
least can give assistance or support.
A main goal of AAL related projects develop-
ing open source middleware software components
is to build a powerful community of application
developers and users of the open source services
and application. This can be any kind of possible
stakeholders e.g. universities, national organizations,
residential house operator etc. This will be important
to guarantee maintenance of the services to provide
good quality to the user and as well to set up and
include perfect security mechanisms and to close
possible security leaks. The attraction for developers
to provide software components under the MIT
license as open source may be that open source
services under the MIT license are underlying the
international valid copyright law. That means the
provider of the services still holds the international
copyright but is providing the sources as ”it is”.
In the social thinking of the gift economy, where
valuable goods or software modules are given with-
out any explicit agreement for immediate or future
reward, the fact of providing a middleware for AAL
applications makes sense to fulfil the aim of having a
commonly used system. The gift economy is a more
and more desirable thinking in western companies or
by private persons, who are not essentially depending
on a money exchange. Ideally, simultaneous or recur-
ring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valu-
ables within the community. Jordan Hubbard wrote
in his article ”Open Source to the Core” (although
referring to it as a barter economy) and essentially
describes a gift culture, where reciprocity is a broad
community custom, rather than an explicit quid pro
A NEED FOR AN INTEROPERABLE OPEN SOURCE MIDDLEWARE FOR AMBIENT ASSISTED LIVING
APPLICATIONS - A Position Paper
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