The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is a non profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. It is best known for managing the BioPerl, BioPython or BioJava web sites and the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) it organises The recent BOSC in Vienna featured a BoF for the preparation of a Live CD to disseminate their work to biologists and to IT people embedded in wet labs. A decision was made to have this effort based on the work that was prepared by the Debian community. The web site http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC/liveCD shows the progress in this endevour and collects references to material tagged to be included. Debian is expected to benefit in multiple manners from this initiative. Most obviously, the awareness of Debian and the Debian-Med community will increase. There will also be more contributors of packages that are inclined to be distributed by Debian. The direct communication with upstream developers may yield an otherwise difficult to reach homogeneity across packages and spawn new ideas for research and applications. The BOSC LiveCD is not meant to compete with a Debian-Med LiveCD. It is particularly the addition of training material by the developers that shall give an extra edge to this initiative. This consequently comprises the distribution of data to be shared by all packages and thus brings Debian-Med to an extra level of usability. Best regards Steffen in the name of all contributors to the BOSC LiveCD
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