The goal of this work is to present an overview of the use and development of health information systems (HIS) reporting the experience of the information management department of a public hospital. Recently, the implementation of HIS has received great prominence. The patient's improvement process can be enriched with the introduction of the patient's history by electronic means, among other technologies. A descriptive study with interviews conducted between the years 2004 and 2007 provided the experience obtained by the Center for Information and Analysis of HC-FMRP-USP. It can be concluded that the success of the HIS implementation can lead to cost reduction and improve the work quality of health care professionals as well as patient care services.

RESUMO Atualmente o desenvolvimento de software é uma das atividades econômicas de maior evidência no mundo dos negócios internacionais. Grandes fortunas e corporações, como a Microsoft, se fizeram com o desenvolvimento e a venda de software proprietário. Nos últimos anos, contudo, tem ocorrido grande aumento do interesse no desenvolvimento do software livre, pois a expansão de seu uso o levou a ser competitivo e até dominante em algumas áreas. Do ponto de vista econômico, o comportamento dos programadores e das companhias comerciais empenhadas em projetos de fonte aberta é intenso. Por que programadores e grandes empresas investiriam tempo e dinheiro em um projeto que não poderiam vender, para obter retornos financeiros imediatos, nem poderiam registrar direitos de propriedade sobre seu trabalho? O objetivo deste artigo foi buscar e discutir as razões que levam empresas e profissionais a participar das comunidades de software de fonte aberta. Além disso, estabeleceu-se, por meio do estudo de caso das empresas Red Hat e Grisoft, a diferença entre software livre e gratuito.

ABSTRACT Currently the software development is one of the most lucrative economic activities. Great wealth and large corporations, as the Microsoft, were built through the proprietary software development and commercialization. In the last years it occurred a great increase of the free software development, therefore the recent and strong expansion of its use took to be competitive and until being dominant in some areas. Evaluating this process by the economic point of view, the individual behavior of the commercial programmers and effort of company to develop open source projects has been intensive. Why programmers and large companies would invest time and money in a project that could not give an immediate financial return and even not provide a register right of property? The objective of this work is the investigation and discussion of the reasons that lead companies and people to participate in the open source software communities.