PhOSCo News
PhOSCo - the Pharma Open Source Community
PhOSCo News
As of August 6th, 2006, control of PhOSCo is now in the hands of Penguin Trials Ltd., to whome all queries should be directed. You can contact them at www.penguintrials.com.
Following recent legal decisions within the USA, and the decision of some potential licencees not to take up free academic PhOSCo licences due to the potential of third-party intellectual property claims, we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we can no longer safely distribute or licence PhOSCo to the United States of America, or any other country or area where "software patents" are legally effective.
We wish to make it absolutely clear that so far as we are concerned, PhOSCo is 100% written by us, with no code other than unprotectable elements such as standard constructs and interface definitions taken from other sources, as with any software. We are not aware of any legitimate third-party claim against any element of PhOSCo.
However, recent events in the USA have shown that it is possible for patents to be granted and to appear that cover wide swathes of functionality that it is impossible for any large-ranging software package like PhOSCo to avoid. We (and others) have hitherto taken the view that these patents are or should be largely unenforcable because of their inherent invalidity, either due to prior art or to the fact of their being obvious to any skilled practitioner in the art (two tests for the validity of patents, normally applied in most patent regimes before the grant of a patent, but apparently untested by the US Patent Office). It now appears that juries are finding such patents applicable, and that large companies who should be expected to vigorously defend against such wide-ranging patents (such as in the recent case of Kodak vs Sun) are spinelessly conceding them. These patents are thus acquiring the precendent of being enforcable under law. The known fact of their existence also places us, in the case of US law, under penalty of tripled punitive damages if we know of their existence and continue any so-called "infringement".
Small companies such as ourselves cannot stand against what is, in effect, a legal protection racket. For us, the lesser evil is not to do business under such a regime.
Accordingly, from 9th October, 2004, PhOSCo is no longer licenceable in the United States of America or any other country or region that employs software patents. We will no longer distribute PhOSCo to such countries. While we cannot stop other persons distributing our software to such places, this is henceforth being done without our permission and contrary to the PhOSCo Licence. It is our position that previous versions of the PhOSCo Licence which allowed such distribution allow it only with the person or organisation doing the distribution being responsible for any third-party claims; and we request and strongly recommend to such licencees that they do not perform such distribution.
As with the Internet it is not easily determinable whether or not someone requesting a download of software or other files is in any particular country or region, we reluctantly have had today to remove the free download facility from this website. In future, anyone requiring PhOSCo software may only obtain it via a PhOSCo subscription or by purchase of a PhOSCo CD-ROM. No future sales or subscriptions will in future be entertained from citizens of countries or regions where software patents obtain.
PhOSCo now offers faster, lower-cost, client server deployment. With PhOSCo LiveCDs you can now:
Either do it yourself from a master supplied by us, or contract us to do the full distribution.
For more details, email me at ceo@phosco.com.
The PhOSCo General Licence is now at Version 6. The only change is in the indemnity against software patents and copyright protection legislation within the USA.
With Web Server, the startup cost per commercial trial has gone even lower - 750 sterling per trial - and volume licencing is even cheaper. Non-profit trials remain zero-charge.
Now there's no excuse not to use the only proven fully scalable commercial product.
The availability of Web Server has made us rework our licencing slightly. The principles are unchanged; commercial use has low charges - by subscription for Web Server (the details are on that page) - while non-profit use remains free. But the relative volumes of non-profit to commercial work (which actually looks like picking up again, luckily) means that we're giving people the opportunity to contribute via a small subscription while simplifying the licencing procedure. The details are on the Community page.
Coding is complete; testing and packaging continues. Click on the "Web Server" button opposite for full details.
Happy New Year, everybody!
There's good news and a slight disappointment.
The disappointment is that we've thought of a way of doing things in Web Server that is so much better that it's worth putting things back a couple of weeks, so our target date for having Web Server available is now 20th January.
The good news is that this Web Server "pre-validation" will be so much better that it will be well worth the wait.
Another industry first for PhOSCo!
The previous design was that the online validations would only be the onpage validations, and that offpage validations would be done when the web browser user turned the page and sent the data back to the server. The server would then do the full validation, and compare the status with that worked out at the browser. If there were differences, a page would be sent back to the browser describing these for the user to either accept as valid on accurate data, or to correct as mistakes.
The reason for doing this was to give full PhOSCo functionality but at an acceptable level of performance.
Other solutions we have seen were to either not do the full validations online at all, and to do the more "difficult" validations as an offline batch process and report out of line situations as Data Queries hours or days later (Oracle Clinical does it this way), or to query back to the server when offpage data is required, causing performance problems.
We thought the "differences" page, presented if and only if there were discrepancies, but done and presented immediately to the user, was the best compromise.
Now we've worked out how not to have to compromise at all.
We've worked out how to provide the full PhOSCo validation functionality including full offpage validation online in the web browser without having to either connect to a database or send messages to and fro between browser and server.
This means that we can promise, when we release PhOSCo Web Server later this month, that:
The PhOSCo Web Server will deliver to the user:
- the identical immediate validation functionality of normal client-server PhOSCo
- with the same performance as normal client-server PhOSCo.
Only page turn will be a little slower because of the transmission time between browser and server.
Slight delay, unfortunately - our developers have been hit severely by 'flu. With other commitments we have, it now looks like end December before we have a complete working solution.
The good news is that we have the full update cycle working - we can logon and request CRF pages in a normal browser, display the data with exactly the same format as a standard PhOSCo Trial Recorder page, enter and locally validate new data, send it to the server, and have the server update the standard PhOSCo database; all without any change to the original Trial definition.
Response times look pretty good - we're talking about a second response plus the network latency time - there's no pinging back and forth in this model.
All we have to do is just code the other stuff. We are now 100% sure we can deliver a PhOSCo Web Server that:
How about this for a scenario where time to FPV is crucial?
If we have a large phase III trial where, as usual, maybe 70% of the subjects come from the most productive 30% of the sites, maybe you only deploy standard PhOSCo to those 30% of the sites. Low data volume sites could be reasonably well handled with the web server approach; sites with the higher data volumes will need the more productive, responsive, and available solution of standard client/server PhOSCo. This approach would significantly reduce deployment effort and costs, as well as reducing time to FPV significantly.
We are currently in the early stages of producing a Web Server version of PhOSCo. This will provide PhOSCo functionality to users without their having to install PhOSCo software on their remote site collection machines - any standard Web browser capable of running the Java plug-in will be able to be used. The PhOSCo Web Server will run on the same metadata trial definitions as currently created using PhOSCo Trial Builder, and thus allow a mix-and-match of web and full client solutions, within the same trial if necessary.
People who know Web Server capabilities will realise that this is not as good as it sounds - there will inevitably be a loss of performance and functional limitations in the Web Server version, so people who are used to full PhOSCo functionality and speed will probably prefer to stay with classic PhOSCo. However, it does make sense to use the Web Server version in some cases, where for example large numbers of users are needed to report relatively small amounts of data, or where particularly rapid deployment is needed.
Where a PhOSCo Web Server already exists, for example, it will be possible to create, test, validate, document, and deploy a new trial in a single day.
We believe that PhOSCo will be the only product on the market offering such flexibility for users, offering web-based collection where appropriate, with the option of more capable full function client software where necessary. PhOSCo is, of course, still the only commercially-available solution proven fully scalable from small University departments to hundreds of trials a year within a single organisation. PhOSCo Web Server should make PhOSCo the obvious choice for all EDC.
We hope to have the PhOSCo Web Server available by the end of November 2003, and it will be available under a low-cost subscription agreement for commercial users, and free of charge to non-profit academic users. If you are interested in discussing the use of PhOSCo Web Server, contact us at phweb@phosco.com.
We are in the final stages of testing driver software for the IBM DB2 Universal Database and Oracle. This will give our users even more database options, particularly extending flexibility for large server systems. This version has now been incorporated into the evaluation version available on the download page.
The download page now contains an evaluation version of PhOSCo Version 1.3. This contains all the function of PhOSCo except communications, as before, so all the new AutoValidation function is now available.
You will have noticed that we leave hype to other EDC vendors; after all, they only have money and marketing; we deliver function.
We're sorry, but we have to start to blow our trumpet.
PhOSCo AutoValidation is probably the most significant advance in EDC functionality since we introduced the first end-user EDC build tool, seven years ago.
We thought it was going to be good, but even we're impressed; if you want the next big advance in EDC, take out a licence or subscription now.
PhOSCo Version 1.3 has AutoValidation. For some of what it can do, see the AutoValidation page.
Older PhOSCo News has been moved to the PhOSCo News Archive Page.
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