Hello, in Vienna I had the opportunity to present the Debian-Med page and Debian in toto to representatives of IBM, SGI and HP. Guess what - they all liked it a lot, none knew about it. With some caveats that they might like about everything at such occasions and as a non-native English speaker I might have missed something, I truly feel that we could get (access to) hardware for Debian fairly easily, particularly here to mention are PowerPC-compatible Cell machines.
What and how much they would give us would depend on how we present ourselves to them, which again depende on what we would need them for, of course. Do we need such machines in the first place and if so, what would be needed? Do we need physical access? Or is something we can ssh into remotely sufficient? Are we Debian-Med-lers with a fairly low DD-density different from core Debian developers who have access to a wide range of machines already? Should we just ask for more money to travel rather than asking for machines? What could we offer to industrial partners? Well, probably that * they can promise to have a fairly complete set of Open Source Bioinformatics readily in place for their system. * they have close contacts with the community providing such packages * they experience greater visibility of yet more exotic hardware like the Cell Should Debian-Med maybe just not attempt in the first place to acquire some kind of funding for itself? Of course all donations would be shared with every DD, but maybe it is just good idea to have the possibility to grant active not-yet-DDs access, too? For our packages of pkg-bioc for instance, which will never completely find its way to the Debian main distribution how I see it, we are missusing Alioth, still. We would very much like to change that. Please let your comments fly in, to the list or addressed personally for me to summarise and possibly sketch a draft of a letter. Steffen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
