What we know know about GNU Health is that it is a free open source software dedicated to keep medical records and provide a robust health information system. It is getting even more popular in terms of usage in some hospitals around the world. GNU Health is supported by GNU Solidario, Spain. This project was made with the help of a virtual community of medical specialists, hospital administration and software developers.

Now, more and more functionalities are being added to GNU Health to enhance its helpfulness and drive even more utility for the open source software. Sebastian Marro, one of the developers of GNU Health and its representative in the presentation at the Luxembourg Medetal Conference is completely positive to the open source software’s potential to grow larger. GNU Health now have recently-added features: it has now the functions to use in hospital human resource tasks, check the financial reporting of some departments, as well as patient admission. These are large scale features are very helpful for hospitals that have a huge database of patient, employee and medical information. GNU Health also enables doctors to keep track of the numbers of endemic diseases like dengue, leprosy, and many others.

GNU Health is a perfect example of how open source and the synchronicity of human goals to uplift the circumstances of public health and medical records produces astounding results. The software enables some hospitals from third world countries such as Nigeria, Zambia, and the Philippines among others to utilize software without the added financial burden.

The first day of the Linux Foundation’s seventh annual Linux Collaboration Summit that took place in San Francisco focused on the growth and success of the foundation. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation said that each day, about 10,519 lines of code are added to the Linux kernel and about 6,782 lines are subtracted from it giving the kernel an average of 7.38 changes per hour which is an extraordinary rate for any code base.

Zemlin opened the floor by describing the state of Linux as “freakishly awesome.” He went on by comparing Linux to that of a multi-million dollar R&D project that over 400 companies collaborate on, some of which are fierce competitors. He also described it as more than just an operating system and one of the greatest shared technology known to man.

On a separate keynote session, Jonathan Corbet, a kernel contributor and LWN.net editor said that even though Linux has been very successful to date, the pace of the kernel development is still accelerating. With significant milestones such as having the kernel 1.53 million lines bigger than how it was a year ago and the speed of kernel version releases increasing.

“Even though we’re getting busier and more active, we’ve gotten the process so smoothly functioning at this point that we’re able to get the releases out more frequently while we’re at it,” Corbet said. The collaboration summit continued for 3 days with more highlights including a possibility of a car running on Linux.

While Torvalds wrote the original Linux, he didn’t make it as successful as how it currently is without the help of other people. Linus oversees a huge community of developers and along his side, a coder named Alan Cox.

Alan Cox is a British programmer who has heavy influence on how successful Linux is at the moment and has been associated with Linus Torvalds since the earliest days of Linux back in 1991. He began his involvement by debugging one of the first Linux installations belonging to a university. He then fixed a majority of the networking bugs and since then became one of the major developers for Linux.

On Thursday, Cox announced on his Google Plus page that he was leaving both the Linux Project and Intel which is explained on his post saying:

“I’m leaving the Linux world and Intel for a bit for family reasons, I’m aware that ‘family reasons’ is usually management speak for ‘I think the boss is an asshole’ but I’d like to assure everyone that while I frequently think Linus is an asshole (and therefore very good as kernel dictator) I am departing quite genuinely for family reasons and not because I’ve fallen out with Linus or Intel or anyone else. Far from it I’ve had great fun working there.”

He did not indicate however that he is leaving permanently and that may be back at some point in the future. This isn’t the first time that Cox has left the Linux project. Back in 2003, he took a year off from Linux kernel maintenance and was back to work on Red Hat until he moved to Intel.