The only thing I would add to Gunther's essay (appreciated) is that the
reason more people know Linus Torvald's name than Richard Stallman's is
that Torvald came along at a moment and created a model that permitted
just about anyone to contribute to development in a very, very easy way
using the internet. This is the model that medical open source must
follow: using the internet to develop code.
Another example of this, which I share to whoever doesn't already know
about it, is GIMPS: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
Basically, a single individual came up with a program that can run in
background on just about any PC that checks whether a given number is a
Mersenne prime. He freely distributes this program over the internet
along with a list of candidate primes. What has happened is that
ordinary folk have now discovered gigantic primes, for example: a
2,098,960 digit Mersenne prime:
(2^6972593)-1
the largest prime known to man (and woman, same mistake).
"Just how did Nayan Hajratwala (a PriceWaterhouse Coopers employee in
Plymouth, Michigan) find this prime? Nayan's home computer, a 350 MHz
IBM Aptiva [!], used 111 days [over three months] of idle time to find
this prime, though it could have been done in three weeks if run full
time on the same computer."
It is this sort of thing (DES was cracked in a similar manner) that has
made Linux a household word, could change medical computing, and occured
a few years too late for Richard Stallman to get the credit which he deserves.
I wonder what computer language we would all feel best contributing in?
Python? PHP? Java? C++? Should we choose?
John Gage
