On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Jean-Marie Buerstedde wrote: > > I think there is ample opportunity to obtain funding for a biojava > initiative and it seems to be advantageous to get as many as possible > centers and people involved. One idea among others could be to propose > JAVA and especially J2EE as the platform of choice for bioinformatic > programing and the distribution and analysis of genomic data over the > internet. I would also favor to make the whole project open source, but > if needed one could think about compromises. >
Just my $0.02 worth (where is the Euro key on this keyboard?):- Some care needs to be taken here to avoid language wars. If the promotion of Java is seen as a threat to other languages, it can only antagonise some who may have a role in assessing the proposal. Re: the open source issue. We have a number of significant contributions to BioJava from commercial outfits like CAT (Simon Brocklehurst, output parsers) and AgResearch NZ (Mark Schrieber) who have participated on the basis of the current licensing and I am apprehensive of licensing changes that may prejudice continued participation of parties like these. I wonder whether if an attempt were made, whether it would be better pursued on a language-neutral basis as with the OBF affiliates with parties contributing solutions, some (hopefully many) of which are BioJava-based. As the network is the glue here, the language of implementation is not the critical factor. BioJava may end up with a smaller cut of what might be a bigger pie with better chances of getting funded than if it did as a language specific proposal. I think a united presentation by OBF affiliates would look a lot more politically credible. Given the ongoing DAS efforts in this very area and the improvements in genomic data distribution already accruing from these open efforts, I hope a proposal will not attempt to invent yet another protocol for this purpose rather than building on and extending the existing efforts. Anyway, just my thoughts... Best wishes, David Huen _______________________________________________ Biojava-l mailing list - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://biojava.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-l
