Horos is abandoned !!!

[Adrian Mark]

It has been years since Horos got new update or functionality or the plugins got updated  

is Horos now abandonware and they are now just focusing on Falcon MD?

I hope thy get back on track

[Jim Bates]

Good point. I contribute every month to the Horos Project and it doesn't appear to have any further development.

There has not been a blog post in 3 years, since 2021.

JIM BATES

[Haralampos Ladopoulos]

I could not agree more. Monthly donation and no update for so many years....

[Samantha Winters]

We appreciate your feedback and support of Horos. You can download the latest versions of Horos here: https://horosproject.org/download-horos/

We are constantly updating the download page with new versions along with troubleshooting tips, so just revisit if you don't see the latest version or pay attention to your email for announcements. You can see the beta version when you go to the download link, which was made available this past year. We ask those in the Horos Community who can contribute with feedback to try it out and provide feedback for validation, bug resolution, etc. before we make it the official new version. This is really important since Apple is constantly changing their products and we need your feedback to adapt. Two weeks ago, we published this blog, "Top 10 Horos Questions - Answered," on both the Purview and the Horos websites, which provides guidance on which versions are good for what, amongst other tips that you may find helpful. 

Horos is a free, open-source product, and we encourage the open-source community to branch off and iterate to enrich the ecosystem of products with new and better plugins, etc. However, anyone who creates products that use Horos or work with Horos, like Falcon, MD, are different organizations separate and apart from Horos. Plugins or development by entities outside of Horos cannot and will not be maintained by The Horos Project. Please discuss any issues with other products with those organizations.

The Horos community continues to grow adding nearly 5,000 new registered users each month. We appreciate user contributions that help us sustain the current versions of the product.

[James Dodwell]

It seems there are some inconsistencies that need to be addressed. Horos appears to have been inactive for several years, with very little activity on its GitHub page. In fact, aside from a single pull request a few months ago - following a long period of dormancy - there haven’t been any significant updates. This raises questions about the justification for ongoing monthly donations.

Transparency is a cornerstone of any open-source community, and it would be beneficial to publicly disclose how these donations are being used. Furthermore, the existence of private builds, which are described as "updates" but are only available on the webpage, don't align with the principles of open-source.

The community deserves honesty. It’s better to be upfront and transparent about the situation rather than perpetuating any misconceptions.

That's my opinion, anyway... 

[Adrian Mark]

I am sorry to say this is not true

Horos has not been updated since a long time

Not to mention that most plugins are now not working (plugins are essential for radiology work)

TAVI planning, Hip measurements, Lower limb axes and angles and more of such valuable plugins are not longer available, only available in Osirix which to be honest makes us reconsider the donations

A fraction of the time used to develop Horos MD (aka Falcon MD)  could have been beneficial to improve horos which is being supported by users for years

[Haralampos Ladopoulos]

After donating Horos for many years I have been thinking seriously Osirix as an alternative....

[Lohi Karhu]

I'm already making a transition to 3D Slicer, and there are some other tools 'in the wild', as well.

https://www.nora-imaging.com/

"Nora is developed by a team of researchers and clinicians at the University Medical Center Freiburg, Germany"

lohi

[Xenophon Costeas]

Thanks for this discussion. Please allow me to add my assessment:

- I rely on HOROS for my practice (cardiac electrophysiology), mostly as a DICOM viewer and PACS (to retrieve studies on my iphone or at work)

- started with OsiriX in the late '90s, now my database contains 13000 studies (mostly echos, angiography, CT and some CMR)

- switched to HOROS since its inception, and donated sporadically, but:

- at around the Big Sur era, it became obvious that there was some lack of traction for the project

- I believe that the slow descend of HOROS to near-abandonware can easily be explained: the developers were decent people, it's just that the market for Horos itself and their cloud services did not gain traction

- FalconMD when viewed with these factors in mind, somehow becomes less attractive an option

- which brings me to the question: what to do now?

- myself, I've opted for a HOROS fork which can be obtained at https://github.com/frnext/horos/releases/tag/20220801

- this, too, is not really very active but works well on my setup which includes: M2 Macbooks, about 5 OSX86 machines (running Sonoma 14.6.1, with igpus or Radeon GPUs)

- my use case scenario, to reiterate, is mostly storage (i.e. PACS), viewing, some 3D reconstructions (for CTA), and remote retrieval on my iPhone (running Medfilm); no plug-ins btw

- Slicer3D is excellent, but not as clinically-friendly

I plan to keep on using the aforementioned HOROS fork, for as long as I can.

When no longer tenable, I would consider a basic PACS server (hosted on MacOS or Linux) and whichever DICOM viewer of the ones mentioned above appeals to me aesthetically ;-)

With OsiriX, I don't know but I hold some grudge when they changed their business model to subscription-only. Still, it may represent the optimal replacement (I guess the Horos database can be opened as-is).

As before, thanks for this discussion. An a huge thanks to the Horos people.

Xen