Re: Do we need Debian(-Med) machines?
On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Steffen Moeller wrote:
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.
The latter I know perfectly well. I also faced that many people liked Debian-Med
a lot - but until now I got no offer for sponsoring. Perhaps we should talk more
"at the right place. ;-)
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?
Well, Charles had some nice use cases in his response. I can not comment
on it because I have not dealt yet with these issues - I just trust Charles
in this field and thus my following comment is not in contrast to his
suggestions but rather personal additions.
From my point of view extra machines cost extra administration time and
I personally would not really want to care for an extra machine. So if these
people really want to offer hardware I would ask general Debian administration
team whether we could need something - the effect on Debian-Med would be
indirect - at minimum we would raise popularity inside Debian. ;-)
Should we just ask for more money to travel rather than asking for machines?
In fact I would have interest in this point. For instance at the moment I'm
not able to travel on my own expense to DebConf in Argentina next year. I'm
not sure how general sponsoring will work. This year it was a very short list
of sponsored people and I was lucky enough to stay high on top. IMHO it is
very important to spread the idea of Debian-Med also outside of Europe and
thus I would be more than happy if I would have a backup for travel sponsorship
(or general Debian funds could be saved for other people). So if there would
be an option for travel sponsoring I would regard this as very helpful.
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.
Definitely.
* they have close contacts with the community providing such packages
Yes.
* they experience greater visibility of yet more exotic hardware like the Cell
I personally have no idea about Cell. Do we have an architecture that runs
on Cell?
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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