"Dental-On-Line, a French company selling hardware and software for use in dentists' offices, offers full dental assistance suites and associated services. The twenty-first century dentist's office includes a computer with a touchscreen interface for displaying a patient's oral X-rays, photographs, medical history, treatment plans, and other information, all of which needs to be kept secure and backed up. To that end, DOL implements a locked-down KDE interface running on Debian Linux, nightly rsync backups, and remote assistance via VNC for its customers. All data is made available to the customer in widely used formats, in case they choose to switch away from DOL.
"While adapting Debian and KDE for use with touchscreen hardware, DOL's employees had to do a bit of hacking. In accordance with the GPL, they have been returning their code to the community, and recently launched a Web site detailing the various patches they have contributed. The site lists code for Kontact, Konqueror, KDM, and Ghostscript..."
