opensourceinsurance.org has been founded with the aim of creating a community supporting the interests of the insurance industry within open source. It is our belief that insurance has been strangely overlooked by open source projects and that we can best address this by creating a home on the web for open discussions, news and system demonstrations.
The site is open and is run for the community as a whole without bias. If you know of, or are involved in, an insurance related open source project, please let us know so we can add the project's details to the directory. If you have comments on what is available, or what you would like to see being made available, post a message on the forums.
The term Open source usually refers to software that is released with source code under a license that ensures that derivative works will also be available as source code, protects certain rights of the original authors, and prohibits restrictions on how the software can be used or who can use it.
Why should Open Source matter to insurance organisations? For the same reasons that it matters to all commercial organisations: because there is a solid business case for it.
The Insurance Management System is a simple solution developed for any insurance organization to manage its customer their records and the management of the customer's data by the organizations employee and agents.
When I put in to a search engine "open source insurance", I get a page full of one or two companies who seem hell bent on undermining the whole open source.
It appears that they want to charge companies for vetting their OS use by explaining what the various licences they carry mean to them.
OK so why not explain what the licences mean, without charging, at least point them to the place to look. See our article on "What is Open-Source".
I have tried with several of these organisations on how we can prove that we have vetted ourselves and whether there is an easier to understand labelling system. The only response I've got is that they don't give out free advice.
I'm a little disappointed that so many people want to cash in on other's altruism. Many of these companies are simple scaremongering to make an easy buck.
Open Source is Entering the Enterprise Mainstream, Survey Shows
The statistics from a CIO.com survey make it clear: Open-source solutions are becoming more commonplace in corporate IT, if not precisely mundane. The study also identifies where the friction is in business open-source adoption, and which application types are most popular.
In the first part of a 2 part article in EbizQ this month, Dennis Byron opens up the discussion on industry specific Open Source Solutions. The insurance industry gets a specific mention; as does OpenQuote which is listed in our directory. The article is available here. You do have to join their "gold club", but its free of charge.
