[ Thanks to Saint for this link.
]
“Free and open source medical sofware advocates on the
openhealth-list discussed a possible licensing difficulty between
the VistA project and the recently announced Gnu Public Licensing
(GPL’ing) of Sanchez Computer Associates GT.M database. The debate
centers on the fact that VistA, a large collection of Veterans
Administration medical software programs, is public domain. The
source code for the programs are available by the Freedom of
Information Act and has no license at all. However, VistA requires
a database like GT.M to run.”
“The question appears to come down to whether code
obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act is already
considered ‘Free’ by the GPL and/or if VistA is modified to run
with a GPL’ed program whether it automatically becomes
GPL’ed.”