#ubuntu-scientists 2014-11-21
<belkinsa> Oh, wow, people!
<Elleo> I'm a person!
<Elleo> hello :)
<Elleo> saw michael hall mention the ubuntu scientists group in a g+ post the other day, so thought I'd check it out
<belkinsa> Elleo, thanks for checking us out and coming to the channel.  I'm planning to start a project late into the 14.11 cycle as soon as some of the other projects (that I have) finish.
<Elleo> cool, what sort of project?
<belkinsa> I think to help scientists understand that they are tools that are FOSS.
<Elleo> sounds good
<dzho> belkinsa: that sounds great.
<Elleo> I guess awareness of FOSS probably varies quite a lot between disciplines
<dzho> Elleo: I think so, yes.
<Elleo> e.g. I've found it quite widely accepted and used in AI and robotics, but I'd guess the same isn't true of less computer science centric subjects
<dzho> bioperl has been a huge thing, more recently R is huge, from what I've seen.
<dzho> and of course GNU/Linux distributions, there is a pretty good awareness of them, from the laptop to the compute cluster.
<dzho> awareness of FOSS *as* FOSS though I think is poor.
<Elleo> yeah, good point
<dzho> why it is important and so on
<Elleo> one of the main problem I've seen from the AI/robotics side of things is more that people aren't publishing the code they create
<Elleo> so making people more aware of the FOSS ethos and that many of the tools they're already using are FOSS might be helpful in encouraging them to make their own work more usable
<dzho> perhaps.
<dzho> Redhat, via the Fedora project, has siginficant ties with the Rochester Institute of Technology.
<dzho> I have friends there.
<dzho> I do not know what Canonical's aspirations or abilities are in this regard.
<belkinsa> For science?  I think it's more a community thing.
<dzho> it might help people to understand why their cluster is running something Redhat-related, but why everyone seems to want to run Ubuntu or a derivative on their desktops and laptops.
<dzho> it?
<dzho> Scientific Linux seems to be a big thing in physics.  I just heard yesterday that there is a FermiLab flavor and a CERN flavor.
<belkinsa> I know that some one said on our ML that Ubuntu is good for biology work
<dzho> the enormity of the fragmentation here is itself a thing that people need help understanding and navigating.
<dzho> belkinsa: in that regard Ubuntu owes a great deal to debian-med
<dzho> though Ubuntu brings a sort of focus and polish to complement that.
<belkinsa> Yes, but the team seems to not want to join our team...but what.
<dzho> (as it does with Debian overall, IMO)
<belkinsa> Maybe that's what we can do, is polish it.
<belkinsa> If possible,
<dzho> I don't know if we can improve relations with debian-med as an upstream, but that wouldn't be a bad thing to keep in mind to pursue as little opportunities present themselves.
<dzho> including, at a minimum, acknowledgement of their work.
<dzho> (not to say this isn't being done, just that it is an ongoing opportunity)
<belkinsa> We could.

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