[med-svn] r5583 - trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg

[Michael Hanke]

Author: mih
Date: 2010-12-10 03:02:34 +0000 (Fri, 10 Dec 2010)
New Revision: 5583

Modified:
   trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex
Log:
Distribution.

Modified: trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex
===================================================================
--- trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex	2010-12-10 02:50:50 UTC (rev 5582)
+++ trunk/community/papers/11_med-floss_luxemburg/paper-text.tex	2010-12-10 03:02:34 UTC (rev 5583)
@@ -427,11 +427,11 @@
 
 \subsection{Dedicated bioinformatics and medical distributions}
 
-In 2003 to 2005 the advent of several adapted distributions with a
-focus on bioinformatics and medicine could be observed.  Most of them
+Between 2003 and 2005 several adapted distributions targeting
+bioinformatics and medicine emerged.  Most of them
 were based on Knoppix\cite{knopper:2005} (and thus indirectly on Debian).
-The motivation behind was to allow
-a quite small team of less than five people to release
+The motivation behind them was to allow
+a small team of not more than five people to release
 a product with the following features:
 \begin{itemize*}
   \item easy to assemble
@@ -439,34 +439,36 @@
   \item attractive web appearance
 \end{itemize*}
 
-As a result, often some goals had to be relaxed, resulting in
+Due to the complexity of the task these projects had to make compromises
+regarding the quality of their products and where freuqently being
 \begin{itemize*}
   \item sloppy about policy of the underlying Debian system
   \item sloppy about the licenses of the included programs
 \end{itemize*}
 
-It is hard to estimate the user base of such distributions but it can
-be assumed that they were basically used inside the institution where
-developed.
-As a consequence, usually no much
-effort was taken care about setting up a complete support
+It is hard to estimate the user base of such distributions, but it can
+be assumed that they were basically only used inside the institution where
+they were developed.
+As a consequence, usually not much
+effort was invested in setting up a complete support
 infrastructure: bug tracking system, active mailing lists,
 forums, IRC, etc.
 
 %FIXME: security!
 
-It turned out that such approach for the distribution of Free Medical Software is not
-very sustainable.  Some of these distributions issued only a single
-release, others remained afloat longer but continuously loosing
-manpower.  So no security updates were made available and the
-distribution of general software tools persisted in the state of
-when the fork from Debian / Knoppix / other distribution
-was done.  The latter fact made such an approach to distribute software
+It turned out that this approach is not sustainable for the distribution of
+Free Medical Software.
+Some of these distributions issued only a single
+release, others remained longer but were constantly loosing
+manpower.  Furthermore, no security updates were made available and the
+distribution of general software tools stagnated at the point when
+the original fork from Debian, Knoppix or other distribution happened.
+Especially the latter aspect made such an approach to distribute software
 unacceptable for sensible medical data.
 
-That's why Debian Med has a different approach.  The initial team was
-also quite small but has grown in the eight years of existence to more
-than 20 active maintainers.  The idea is to maintain medical
+To prevent these problems Debian Med took a different approach.  The initial team was
+also quite small, but has grown in the eight years of existence to more
+than 20 active maintainers.  The primary idea is to maintain medical
 applications {\em inside} Debian.  This automatically solves all
 drawbacks of the separate distributions mentioned above: There are
 security updates provided without any specific effort of the Debian
@@ -475,24 +477,24 @@
 and an QA team running intense tests regarding software quality (see
 above).
 
-Some similar effort as Debian Med exists in Fedora as
+Similar effort as Debian Med exists in Fedora as
 \printurl{http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/FedoraMedical}{FedoraMedical
   SIG (Special Interest Group)} and in openSUSE as
 \printurl{http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Medical}{openSUSE Medical}.
 Both projects share the same idea to put medical applications inside a
 larger distribution instead of trying to do the work of the
-distributor themselves in a fork of the distribution in question.  The
+distributor themselves.  The
 difference to Debian Med (besides of the different distribution) is
-that both teams are much smaller and thus the number of just packaged
+that both teams are much smaller and thus the number of packaged
 applications is in both cases less than 5\% of the applications
 available for Debian.  Moreover Debian does not distinguish between
-some core distribution and whatever extensions - so if you have a full
-Debian distribution on whatever medium you get all medical
-applications inclusive.
+a core distribution and optional extensions. Consequently, a full
+Debian distribution on whatever medium also automatically contains all medical
+applications as well.
 
 Looking beyond Linux distributions there is also FreeBSD.  The ports
-collection also contains a really nice
- \printurl{http://www.freebsd.org/ports/biology.html}{collection of
+collection also contains a versatile
+\printurl{http://www.freebsd.org/ports/biology.html}{collection of
   biological software}.  The remarkable fact here is not the
 underlying operating system (you can easily have Debian with a FreeBSD
 kernel with Debian 6.0) but rather the fact that the same strategy to