About

Open source, in real life.

OSIRL is a small Irish company with a simple premise: that open source software, properly deployed and properly maintained, is the right foundation for clinical imaging infrastructure — and that properly is the hard part.

The name carries two readings, both intended. Open Source IRL: this is open source in Ireland, rooted here, operating under Irish and European law. Open Source In Real Life: not a proof of concept, not a demo environment, but a production system running in a real veterinary hospital, managing real diagnostic studies, every day.

Why sovereignty matters

When the conversation turns to cloud infrastructure and medical data, GDPR is usually where it ends. It shouldn't be where it starts.

The more important question is jurisdiction. The US CLOUD Act — the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, enacted in 2018 — gives US authorities the legal basis to compel American companies to produce data held on their infrastructure, regardless of where in the world that data physically sits. An AWS bucket, a Google Cloud volume, an Azure instance — all remain subject to US jurisdiction as long as the company that owns the infrastructure is American. This applies equally to their European subsidiaries and their "sovereign cloud" products: jurisdiction follows ownership, not geography. GDPR does not override this. The two regimes exist in direct tension, and for a practice holding sensitive diagnostic imaging data, that tension is not theoretical.

OVHcloud is a French company, headquartered in Roubaix, with no US parent and no US ownership. Data hosted on OVH infrastructure is subject to French law, European law, and nothing else. That was the deciding factor.

Ireland adds a further layer of relevance. The Data Protection Commission — Ireland's independent supervisory authority, and the lead GDPR regulator for the European operations of most of the world's largest technology companies — operates under a legal framework that takes data sovereignty seriously. OSIRL operates within that framework by design, not by accident.

The open source commitment

Every component in the stack — the DICOM archive, the authentication layer, the viewers, the database — is open source software with a real community, a public codebase, and no single vendor who can change the licensing terms, discontinue the product, or disappear. You can read the code. You can fork it. If OSIRL ever ceased to exist tomorrow, your system would keep running, and a competent successor could take over from documented handover materials without starting from scratch.

This is what open source in real life actually means: not a philosophical position, but a practical guarantee of continuity.