One of my previous dentists, who is also a computer enthusiast, told me he switched his office from some proprietary software to http://www.opendental.com and he is completely ecstatic about it. He specifically said he likes the fact that Open Dental is open source, so it gets a lot of the little details done right as it receives contributions from the dentist community. He even demo'd some of the features on his computer for me :)

So I do think that Fred's story is anchored in reality. This open source disruption seems to be taking place.