Here are the links to the slides presented by Michael K. Johnson and Timothy Smith at the AMIA2000 tutorial, "How Open "Source Really Works." Tim Smith is a physicist, the head of Bates Lab at MIT, who described the transition of nuclear physics worldwide from Fortran and disparate operating systems to C, C++ and Linux. There are many analogies between the transition that nuclear physics research made and the one that medical informatics needs to make, so this is interesting to us. Tim's slides are at http://mitbates.mit.edu/blast/software/talksPapers/amiaOpen/ If you print them out, be aware that they are formatted for A4 (European size) paper, so images will be clipped slightly. the .ps file is about 2MB; ps2pdf (A Linux program) quickly converts these to an 800KB .pdf file that displays nicely. Mike's slides are at http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/ They are low on the page, listed with slides from four other talks. All are in MagicPoint format (very readable in a netscape window); the AMIA slides are also in .pdf and .ps.gz format. xpdf is a better reader than Acrobat because it's easy to rotate landscape-format slides. Mike is one of the open source pioneers, the first originator of the Linux Documentation Project, for most of its first two years editor of Linux Journal, co-author of the book, Linux Application Development, a noted teacher on Open Source Best Practices within the OS community, and Kernel Group Manager at Red Hat, Inc. Mike has a lot of experience in managing and working within Open Source collaboration, and he knows what works and what gets in the way.
