This conference may be of interest to roottalk subscribers. There will be an Open Source/Open Science conference at Brookhaven National Lab on October 2nd. URL: http://openscience.bnl.gov/ Scientists have been making good use of public domain software since its inception to do their research. Most hard sciences use computing tools to a great extent and with the advent of the Internet, computer networking capabilities have been come a critical research tool as well. Today, the use of the term, software in the public domain, has given way to the term Open Source. In essence, this term refers to the software which is freely available via the Internet, including the source code form which it was built. Open Source software development projects have provided a foundation from which a lot of computing cycles have been put to good use. Scientists, in their quest for driving down the cost of computing, have migrated to using Open Source operating systems running on mass market computing platforms. Open Source operating systems also tend to have a bounty of Open Source software packages pre-built and properly installed which saves a lot of administrative time. The Internet networking capability of these Open Source operating systems is also first rate, thus enabling the full Internet connectivity scientist have come to expect from their computing environment. Scientists are also starting to following the Open Source paradigm in their own software development efforts by publishing their source code on the Internet. Sharing the effort in their software development over the Internet has given them more time to work on their core research activities. At this point in time, the Open Source software development paradigm is gaining major recognition in the private domain. Because of the recent swell in awareness of Open Source software by the general public, it was deemed that the time was ripe to hold a conference which dealt directly with the issue of Open Source and science. There are many common threads which drive the advances in the two fields which have been addressed elsewhere. Also, the two fields share the same friction caused by market forces when it becomes a major participant in the development cycle. The conference will expose the benefits and draw backs of the open source development model and the software which it has produced and is capable of producing in the future. It will explore the extent to which it is helping scientists advance in their research and the possibility of feeding back those advanced to the community which has brought the Open Source code base to its current mature level.
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