Distributors 

We get many phone calls from local computer consultants interested in selling Open Dental in one form or another. Please start by reading the FAQ. Then read this page, which should answer the remainder of your questions.

If you call us with questions that are already answered here, we will politely redirect you to read this page and the FAQ.

We understand that our license and is unique. We firmly believe that open software is the only viable long-term solution for the dental software industry. Ten years from now, we hope that these policies will have resulted in worldwide acceptance of Open Dental as the standard for all dental software.

Typical Scenario
If you are a computer hardware consultant of some sort, and you have customers who you feel would benefit from this software, you would typically refer them to us for the purchase or support of the software. You would charge the customer for your time, for the hardware, and for the hardware and networking support. Then, they would use us for software support including questions about how to use the software. For installation issues, we can work together without having to involve the customer, making their life easier. The obvious advantage to you is that the customer will be getting a very high quality software, but will still have lots of money left over to purchase hardware from you.

CDT License
The full version of Open Dental includes copyrighted CDT content, including the ADA claimform, and the ADA procedure codes.  Because this content is copyrighted, we are not allowed to include it in the source code.  We have a license to distribute this content to our paying customers only.  Any other distributor can also obtain their own license to distribute this content.  Go to http://www.ada.org/ada/prod/catalog/cdt/commercial.asp and apply for license #1a. Software License for Practice Management Software Vendors. Once a distributor obtains an ADA license, we can provide technical documentation on how to include CDT content in the executable.

Selling
If you have multiple customers who might use Open Dental, and they don't need or want software support, you can resell the software yourself.

Distributing and Supporting
If you are very experienced with dental software, you could support the Open Dental customers yourself.  Start by obtaining the CDT license as explained above (USA only). All of your customers must follow the ADA license.

We are very open to this type of relationship, so don't worry about us trying to compete with you. We will respect all your customer relationships and will never try to take customers from you. But please do keep in mind that some users may discover that we exist and might choose to call us on their own. We might not even be aware that they already have a relationship with you, and there is a risk that we might try to sign them up. If we become aware of a previous relationship, we refer the customer back to the original company to work things out.  If that company cannot provide adequate service, then we sometimes agree to support the customer after an honest and reasonable attempt at reconciliation.  The most important step to take to keep this from happening is to provide good customer service.  It's not acceptable to not answer the phone and to not return messages promptly.

Your users will need help with installing and using the software. They may have complicated questions about how the features work or how to get the most out of the software. This would not typically be profitable for you unless you had at least a few dozen customers and you could roll it into a package deal for them. You can sign up for a support contract with us in case you run into a difficult question that you can not answer. The contract would cost you the same as a single dentist office; see the Support page for prices. We will provide a reasonable level of support to you, but we will not have any direct communication with any of your customers, since they are your responsibility, not ours. See the Distributor List.

Foreign Countries
We are not able to provide extensive support to dental offices in many foreign countries. This is due to the timezone and language differences. So we are expecting local software developers in those counties to become interested in Open Dental and begin distributing and supporting it themselves. The support options would be the same as outlined above. Typically, you would purchase support from us and then you would in turn support your local customers. We will eventually extend our telephone support to 24 hour service, but that will not solve the language problems or the local laws and regulations that will hinder us. If you make changes to the source code, we would suggest submitting them to us for inclusion in general release. Keep in mind that we will not pay for such assistance and that it is up to you to figure out how to make a profit by selling and supporting the software locally.

If providing support yourself seems too hard, we can still provide direct support to the dental offices ourselves, but we may have to do it mostly by email, or during daytime hours in our timezone. We try to do the best we can for foreign countries, so if the office has purchased email support from us, then we can also work directly with you to help resolve issues faster. We would probably be available between about 5am and 5pm our time, but that is just an estimate.

Counting Users
However you happen to distribute it, we would love to know how many copies are going out so that we can have an idea of how many users there are. Of course, we intend to grow very rapidly, and we want to be able to say that there are many users of the software.