NewsForge: French Company Embraces, Contributes to Free Software

“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…”

Complete
Story